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ALSO BY JOHN BERGER
To the Wedding Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag: A Trilogy) A Painter of Our Time Permanent Red The Foot of Clive Corker’s Freedom Art and Revolution The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles Ways of Seeing Another Way of Telling A Seventh Man G. About Looking And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos Keeping a Rendezvous
AFortunateMan
The Story of a Country Doctor
John BergerJean Mohr
Introduction by Gavin Francis
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 1967 by Allen Lane,
The Penguin Press, Vigo Street, London W1
This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 1967 by John Berger
Copyright renewed 1995 by John Berger
Photographs copyright © 1967 by Jean Mohr
Photographs copyright renewed 1995 by Jean Mohr
Afterword copyright © John Berger, 1999
Introduction copyright © Gavin Francis, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 501 4
eISBN 978 17 8211 502 1
Typeset in Goudy 11/15 pt by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
This book is dedicated to
John and Betty whom it concerns, and
to Philip O’Connor
for the letters he wrote to me whilst I was writing it.
J.B.
Contents
Introduction
A Fortunate Man is a masterpiece of witness: a moving meditation on humanity, society, and the value of healing. First published in 1967 it remains strikingly original, blending John Berger’s text with Jean Mohr’s photographs in a series of superb reflections on the doctor’s role, the roots of cultural and intellectual deprivation, and the motivations that drive medical practice. The subject of the book, John ‘Sassall’, emerges as an individual deeply committed to inner reflection as well as to his vocation as a physician. When I was working as a newly qualified doctor it became my habit to give copies as gifts. For years it’s been out of print and increasingly scarce; the habit was becoming expensive.
When asked how to approach his own work, Berger has often replied, ‘I’m a story-teller.’ ‘Even when I was writing on art,’ he said in 1984, ‘it was really a way of story-telling – story-tellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people.’* When I went to meet Berger, to ask him how he and Mohr came to create A Fortunate Man, he began by telling me a story.
It started in London, in the early 1950s, when Berger was a commentator on art for the New Statesman. His essays and reviews were unconventional as well as controversial; he had to fight to keep his job. ‘We received a marvellous essay from an Indian writer called Victor Anant,’ he told me, ‘called “An English Christmas”. On the back of the envelope was the return address: “Left Luggage Office, Paddington Station”. I jumped on my motorbike and drove over to meet him. He’d not long arrived from Bombay, and this was the first job he’d found.’
Anant, like Berger, distrusted established power; in India he had been imprisoned by the Raj. The two men became friends and, several years later when Berger was living in rural Gloucestershire, Anant and his Pakistani wife were drawn to live nearby. Sassall was the single-handed general practitioner who attended the two men at that time.
‘I became friends with Sassall after going to him with some minor medical problem,’ Berger explained. ‘He cured me, and we became friends. I used to meet regularly with him and with Anant to play bridge.’ The two writers recognised in Sassall an outstanding physician as well as the enthusiast of an unfashionable ideal – the Renaissance dream of aspiring to universal knowledge and experience. As a doctor who sought daily to empathise with others, though they be of very different backgrounds and perspectives, they perceived that Sassall came closer to attaining this ideal than most men or women ever could.
By the mid 1960s Berger had moved to Geneva, but both he and Anant were still in touch with Sassall. One day, Anant suggested that Berger write a book about their friend, his medical practice, and his determined pursuit of the universal. Berger again: ‘“You know, this man is really remarkable,” Anant told me, “but one day no one will know of him. His goodness will have consequences, of course, but unless you write about him, the specifics of his life and his attitude may not be preserved.”’
Jean Mohr was at that time also living in Geneva; a photojournalist with the Red Cross and the United Nations who had done some of his finest work documenting the stateless experience of Palestinian refugees. ‘Jean is one of the truly great photographers,’ Berger told me, ‘utterly invisible, blending into the background like a lamp-stand – the perfect man to sit in on medical consultations.’ Sassall invited Berger and Mohr to live with him and his family for six weeks and, with his patients’ permission, join him night and day in the clinic and on emergency visits.
Afterwards the two men returned to Geneva and worked in isolation from one another for just a month – Berger recalls the text flowing fairly quickly. ‘When we got together again, and compared what I’d written with the photographs Jean had chosen, we found we’d replicated one another’s work entirely,’ he said. ‘They were tautologous – as if my text was a series of captions to his images. We had both tried to write the book on our own. That’s not what
