John Berger: Ways of Learning

Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger’s work and friendship had on her working life as a GP. It includes extracts from letters that span 20 years of her correspondence with John Berger.

In this book, Iona Heath writes about reading John Berger’s writing over more than 50 years and her friendship and correspondence with him over the best part of 20 years. Dr Heath found that both of these interacted profoundly with her work as a general practitioner in a deprived urban area in London. For Iona Heath, general practice is a quite extraordinary undertaking: every working day, sitting with a succession of unique individuals, each worried about some aspect of their health or life circumstances, many burdened by unspoken fears, and each seeking some form of answer. Starting with A Fortunate Man, when she was an ignorant but hopeful undergraduate medical student, she found reading John Berger on any subject had something new to tell her about the aspirations and detail of her work: clues about how to look and how to listen and much else. Later when they started to correspond, Iona Heath found herself in the privileged position of being able to check her understanding directly with the writer and on each occasion found deeper levels of awareness and insight. She is convinced that reading John Berger made her a better doctor.

Iona Heath, Retired general practitioner

Iona Heath is a retired inner city general practitioner (1975-2010) and past President of the UK Royal College of General Practitioners (2009-2012). She has written regularly for the British Medical Journal and has contributed essays to many other medical journals across the world. She has been particularly interested to explore the nature of general practice, the importance of medical generalism, issues of justice and liberty in relation to health care, the corrosive influence of the medical industrial complex and the commercialization of medicine, and the challenges posed by disease-mongering, the care of the dying, and violence within families.