A Fortunate Man : the story of a country doctor [book review]

I took John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man: the story of a country doctor to read over the New Year holiday. Berger’s account of a General Practitioner working in the Forest of Dean in the 1960s, illustrated with Jean Mohr’s photographs, was first published in 1967 and reissued by Canongate in 2015. The extended essay opens with vignettes of patients attended by an old-fashioned community physician in a rural area: a woodman trapped under a felled tree; a young woman’s asthma brought on by the stress of a failed affair; the hopeless grief of a widowed farmer; and the severe piles of a man who has long lived as a woman