Portrait of GP in line for prize
Book find inspired Polly Morland’s true story of a country doctor
At a time when the work of GPs and their relationship with patients is high on the health agenda, A Fortunate Woman by Penny Morland is a timely release. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022, A Fortunate Woman is a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor.
Its author Polly Morland, a writer and documentary maker, was clearing her late mother's house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives.
The book was A Fortunate Man, John Berger's classic account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier.
The chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager.
Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out.
"One on level it’s a documentary study, this portrait in miniature of this really remarkable female GP,” said Morland. “It is a love letter to a landscape and a community.
"It is also a much bigger story about what it means to be a doctor today, a general practitioner, it is the story about the nature of medical vocation and the process and practice of care and how fundamental the doctor/ patient relationship is to both of those things.
The book is llustrated throughout with photographs by Richard Baker.