The anatomy of a family in seven maladies

Stephen McGann shot to fame as the youngest of the four acting McGann brothers and is today best known for his portrayal of Dr Turner in BBC’s Call The Midwife, a show that was actually created by his wife, writer Heidi Thomas. Drama and reality repeatedly intersect in unexpected ways in this powerful and revealing memoir.

McGann’s subject is his family, which he traces back as far as his great-great-grandparents, survivors of The Famine the public records, he has been able to establish the cause of death of many family members, and from this he has extrapolated biographical sketches of lives cut short by disease.

He subtitles his book A History Of My Family In Seven Maladies.

It sounds a bit macabre – and it is – but McGann is extremely knowledgeable about medical matters, which he explains with a clarity that shames many popular science writers. It seems that playing a TV doctor really has rubbed off on him.

However, with biographical facts so thin on the ground, McGann is often reduced to supposition, making eloquent but unverifiable guesses about what various family members might have been thinking, feeling or doing.

This can make him sound portentous, and it occurred to me that he might have been better off simply recasting the story as fiction. As other parts of the book show, he possesses a novelist’s eye.

There’s a fascinating section on a great-uncle who survived the Titanic, but McGann really comes into his own when he’s writing from personal experience. He describes his parents’ marriage with tenderness and understanding, and is deeply moving on the subject of his own.

The last malady he describes afflicted his wife, and she very nearly died. It’s an experience that affected them both profoundly and informed their subsequent careers.

Real life, it turns out, can be every bit as dramatic as anything we see on television.