A FORTUNATE WOMAN

60 mins

30 Apr 2023

PENNY MORLAND

The chance discovery of A Fortunate Man, John Berger’s classic 1967 account of a country doctor working in the Forest of Dean, led Polly Morland to seek out the GP who serves the same community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager. A Fortunate Woman tells her story. Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out, the lives of this ancient, wild place entwined with her own. Revisiting Berger’s story after 50 years of change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practised, A Fortunate Woman sheds light on what it means to be a doctor in today’s complex and challenging world. Interweaving the doctor’s story with those of her patients, reflecting on the relationship between landscape and community, and upon the wider role of medicine in society, a unique portrait of a twenty-first century family doctor emerges.

Polly will be interviewed by Dr Helen Salisbury.