A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

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The anonymous inspiration of Morland’s book – who becomes a kind of emblematic GP everywoman – is Dr Rowena Christmas. In the past,” the doctor says of some of his lonelier and more troubled regulars, “they might have gone to see their vicar. Astonishingly perceptive, it shows how a committed GP can keep human values alive in an increasingly impersonal NHS – and why we urgently need more like her. Practicing in a small town where your patients are neighbors and friends where having to share a sad diagnosis is an even harder task. You are left all the time with that horrible feeling: I’m missing patients that I would normally have phoned up to check in how they’re doing.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan

Following Morland’s approach, there followed months of conversations and long walks to build a portrait of a contemporary GP who, like her predecessor, has made the choice, insofar as she is able, to become a lynchpin of “the valley”.It’s one of the reasons that it’s hard to retain reception staff, though most here have been in the job for several years. Morland didn’t know the book, but she did know the current GP, who had been practising in the valley for 20 years.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten

I would use the term crisis: so many parts of the NHS are under such enormous pressure that they are unable to provide the personal care that patients need, unable to provide effective care, and increasingly unable to even provide safe care. Behind the outcry about waiting times lies the anxiety that our cherished GP system will, in the words of one Gloucester doctor, ‘soon reach a threshold where there is a collapse’.

At a time of a barrage of negative publicity directed towards GPs, it is a book that reveals the positive impact that a caring GP has on the lives of their patients. She understands her patients as people, how they are rooted into their context, community and landscape and the fascinating interplay of the biological, social and psychological domains of illness.

Stress, exhaustion and 1,000 patients a day: the life of an

She left district nursing five years ago to set this up because that role had “become completely task-oriented. I only realised that Polly Morland wrote ‘The Society of Timid Souls’ which I absolutely loved when I got the Fortunate Woman home. They certainly do with me, now more than ever as increasing workload and changing systems threaten the continuity and quality of care that we can provide. The monitor is high on the wall of the back room of the reception area where half a dozen women are answering phones. As much as the book is heart warming (sometimes) and discusses morality and ethics which I do find interesting.

Dr Christmas, in the book and in person, could hardly be more positive about her vocation, but even so she fears the way of life she represents is under threat: “All I want to say is positive stuff about general practice,” she says, “but if I’m honest, I’m very worried about where we’re going to be in five years’ time. At the college’s threescore and 10, outgoing president Martin Marshall offers a sobering assessment of how the profession is bearing up. This focus on the whole person, while valuable in all medical disciplines, is bread-and-butter work for GPs. Meanwhile, since the pandemic, doctors and nurses and reception staff have been leaving jobs and partnerships in unprecedented numbers. The real sense of community and connection shines through that is still present in many areas of the Forest.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland | Book review | The TLS A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland | Book review | The TLS

A Fortunate Woman is a great read for the writing and stories it contains alone, but it is also a compelling argument for the importance of continuity of care and the need for us to have the time to be able to listen to and understand our patients and to develop doctor-patient relationships based on mutual respect and trust, at a time when we really need it. Extraordinarily vivid descriptions of the valley and the seasons… The way descriptions of the landscape are woven into the humanity of the characters depicted is nothing short of magical. Continuity is still nominally the gold standard, but the system is no longer designed to support it.

In this rare rural setting the doctor knows her patients well and provides a system of continual care in their community. In 2020 she was clearing her mother’s house, after her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, had been moved into a care home. The emphasis, and indeed the measure of success, has shifted from the individual patient to the disease. Revisiting Berger’s story after half a century of seismic change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practiced, A Fortunate Woman sheds light on what it means to be a doctor in today’s complex and challenging world. I’ll give you one example of where we are,” he says, as he heads back over to his consulting rooms for the next round of patients in his evening clinic.