Being a GP is a performance – as perhaps are most jobs. But GPs have an audience in their patients, and for most of us there will always be speculation about what is going on in the minds of our doctors. What are they thinking as they pronounce and prescribe? What happens when they get sick themselves? Are they as stressed as we imagine, given their crowded waiting rooms, the ceaseless demand for their services, the lack of time and the NHS box-ticking bureaucracy? How do they manage what one imagines are squeezed private lives? Are they, once outside their surgeries, as faulty, neurotic, hypochondriacal as the rest of us?
But these are not questions I was expecting to have addressed in print, let alone with candour, informality, warmth and absence of taboo. This wonderfully readable and unusual book is not conventional in its approach, which is partly what makes it sympathetic. It is personal, conversational, unpredictable. Martin Scurr (distinguished physician and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians) and Jane Haynes, a psychotherapist (author of a wonderful memoir, Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?), are friends and ideal collaborators. Most of the book is set out in Q&A interviews. Haynes is the woman with the questions, and dogged about asking them. Smart and intrepid, she doesn’t miss a trick. She interviews more than half a dozen doctors, and we hear how and why they were drawn to medicine, learn about their family lives, their health problems, their attitude towards death and the dying (it is not a little alarming to read more than one anaesthetist admit to a fear of being put under). She reveals that many of the doctors are impatient patients. One doctor remarks: “We are doctors and not patients and so we are on the other side of the Berlin Wall.”
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