The Cure for Good Intentions

by Sophie Harrison

The Cure for Good Intentions is about a life-changing decision. At the age of twenty-eight, Sophie Harrison left her job as an editor at a prestigious literary magazine and put herself through medical school and hospital training before becoming a GP. From peaceful office days spent writing tactful comments on manuscripts, she entered a world that spoke an entirely different language. The scenes were familiar from television and books- long corridors, busy wards, stern consultants, anxious patients- but what was her part in it all? Back in the community as a new GP, the question grew ever more pressing.

This is a book about how a doctor is made: it asks what a doctor does, and what a doctor is. What signifies a doctor: a bedside manner? A mode of dress? A stethoscope? What is empathy, and what does it achieve? How do we deal with pain, our own and other people’s? The Cure for Good Intentions is an outsider’s look at the inside of a profession that has never been so scrutinised, or so misunderstood.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Medical, Medicine

248 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 2021

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrison retrained as a doctor in her late twenties after working as an editor for Granta. (There’s a similar author trajectory at work in 34 Patients, but this is much the better book.) I thoroughly enjoyed her deadpan take on medical school and her early years of GP practice. Medical memoirs are a dime a dozen these days, and I’ve read many by now, but this was one of the better ones. (And I love a Leanne Shapton cover.) The only thing I found irksome was that Harrison uses the same pseudonym for EVERYone: Mr/Mrs/Dr Smith. Anonymity, sure, but she could have made up actual names.

Favourite lines:

“I had started to find my personality problematic. Being professionally gentle was making gentleness feel false.”

“We arrived for our first-ever working day at the hospital ready to commit heroic acts of lifesaving. We carried stethoscopes and tourniquets. But the first nurse we saw did not ask us to restart anyone’s heart. Instead, he handed us a pile of drug charts, each one labelled with a Post-it note ‘REWRITE PLEASE :-)’.”

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure - I know Sophie, though I haven’t seen her in years. We didn’t meet through medicine, but both helped out with a charity sending people to teach English in rural Asia. As it turns out, we both had the same revelation about starting medicine at the same age - though hers was on a beach in Palestine and mine was up a windy hill in Derbyshire.

Sophie worked as an editor before retraining and always had a wryly accessible writing style. I read an article she wrote about medical school back in the day and loved it, so was delighted to find she’d written a book. I remember her describing exams in the article where she’d had to examine a giant plastic ear while asking an actor sat on the other side of the room if it was uncomfortable. It chimes with my memory of an exam where I had to take a genetic history from a young male student who said his name was Margaret and was 56 years old. Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

I read ‘Trust Me I’m a Junior Doctor’ but found it too painfully close to the many and varied traumas of my junior doctoring, so haven’t read any of the other medical memoirs out there. I think I’m at a safe distance now because this book made me smile rather than cringe. The focus is on training, the early years of medical rotation, and then the world of GP. It’s skilfully done, with a mix of funny and harrowing experiences. As you might expect, there are stories of illness, pain and death, even the opioid epidemic - but I always had a sense a Sophie was learning, and wanted the best for her patients.

This a book didn’t make me wish I’d become a GP - the opposite probably, though I did appreciate the insights. Would love to see what my Goodreads friends thought of it, especially the ones who’ve read similar books - I really enjoyed it and read it in three days, but had the benefit of Sophie’s voice in my head throughout. Jolly good!

[Ahtims · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journalist turned doctor, who decided to specialize in GP, Harrison took me through medical school and her practice in a crispy narrated book.
Once you specialise in some branch, you tend to forget what you learnt in MBBS. I found this book to be a refreshing micro course .
Would definitely recommend to all, especially Healthcare workers.

[Simon Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sophie Harrison was an editor at Granta magazine before she decided to retrain as a doctor. She started medical school in 2003—the same year as me—and this memoir of her time at medical school through to her early career as a GP has just been published. I picked this up as I was aware of Harrison's background and thought it was likely that she would write well about her career, which I thought would be quite fun to read. I've somehow never really clocked her pieces in the LRB or the Financial Times Weekend despite regularly reading both.

I though this book was wonderful: warm and witty, exactly the tone I would like to strike if I had enough talent to write about my own medical training. The fact that Harrison is a contemporary of mine meant that her story brought back a lot of memories from my own training, moreso than the many medical biographies from different eras. Harrison's background also gives her a literary appreciation for medicine, and there are lots of references to medicine in literature contrasted with her own experiences.

I enjoyed this enormously, more even than I expected. The combination of great writing and the reminisces it engendered as I read made this a real pleasure.

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but a bit disjointed maybe as the chapters are on different bits of medicine, such as pain, observations, dying and women and babies rather than a chronological look into training to become a GP. I liked that it ended with Covid.
Calling each person Mrs Smith, Mr Smith, Dr Smith got quite annoying. Would have been better to give them pseudonyms or leave it as Mr J or Miss T or even ‘the patient’.
Still, an interesting read.

[Sebastiaan de Jager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy reading story of someone becoming a doctor later in life. The book focuses less on an overarching story rather than snippets out of their life and remarkable experiences. Emphasises the experiences a doctor (in training) might actually have, rather than what you see on TV. (it's still never lupus)

[Emily Fletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 An interesting medical memoir from Sophie Harrison, who was an editor at Granta before retraining as a GP, but one which lacked cohesion for me. There are a lot of interesting anecdotes and I enjoyed Harrison's narrative voice, which is quite straightforward. But the stories felt quite disjointed at times, I didn't understand all of them within their context, and I wanted more of a connecting thread throughout the memoir - quitting a successful job to retrain as a doctor is a huge choice, but got moved on from quite quickly, and I didn't feel like I quite got to the motivations or the heart of the story.

[Susan Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written insight into the experience of training and becoming a GP. Useful insight into how challenging the public can be for doctors to interpret. Compelling - read it in 48 hours.