Abstract

50 years ago, the visionary writer John Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr published A Fortunate Man, a meditation on the role of a doctor that is still widely read by healthcare practitioners today. The book followed the daily life of English country general practitioner John Sassall, witnessing his compassion as well as his practice as a physician through storytelling and photography. 15 years after the book’s publication, Sassall took his own life. Taking this tragic event as a starting point, New Perspectives teams up with theatre maker, Michael Pinchbeck, to create a stage exploration of the book, interposing it with interviews with medical practitioners today. Part theatre-lecture, part expressionistic explosion of the book, A Fortunate Man is an interrogation about the passions and pressures of being a doctor in the modern world and what that says about the future health of our society.

Full show video filmed at premiere at CPT (London) and subsequently toured to Manchester Medical College, Ways of Seeing Festival (Nottingham), The Forest of Dean, Summerhall (Edinburgh), Singapore Fringe, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Studiobuhnekoln (Germany).