Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor

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Most of the antipodean beachcombers were heavy drinkers. It was a way of life with them. An Australian trader consulted me one day because of a serious drink problem he had.

‘I only had ten cans yesterday, doc,’ he said. ‘And today I haven’t had any. I just don’t feel like it. Today’s the first day in ten years I haven’t had a drink.’

I looked at him. He was yellow; he had hepatitis.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got hepatitis. That’s why you don’t want to drink. What’s more, you mustn’t drink for at least three months.’

‘Oh!’ he said.

‘And I see from looking at your hospital records that sometimes you vomit blood in the morning.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘It’s not a terribly good sign, you know.’

‘Oh, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did it.’

He returned three months later. To my surprise he had not touched a drop.

‘Hey doc!’ he said. ‘I feel terrific, I haven’t felt this good in years. Why’s that then?’

‘Why do you think?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. You’re the doc, you should know.’

‘Well, for the first time in ten years you haven’t got a hangover.’

‘Oh.’

A look of deep cogitation passed over his face like the shadow of a cloud over a field on a summer’s day.

‘Does that mean I can go back on the beer?’

Some men become doctors out of a noble desire to save lives, or because they seek money and prestige; Anthony Daniels did so because he was middle class, because he had to do something and because his father – not a man to be lightly gainsaid – pushed him into it.

But this inauspicious beginning led to a great career – if not as a doctor , then as a doctor-writer.

Both in his own name, and under his better-known nom de plume of Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels is a prolific author whose work has spanned 30 years and much of the globe.

His formidable energy is equalled in his prose by a clarity and elegance which few can match, and it is this, as well as his unusual experience, originality of insight and unconventional views , which have won him worldwide acclaim.

But although he is read – as Theodore Dalrymple – in almost every country on earth, relatively little is known about him.

Fool or Physician, which was his second book and remains his most personal, offers his followers a small insight into his past.

It details his reluctant entry into medical school , his earliest ventures in medicine in a small midlands town and his subsequent work overseas when, bored almost to tears by life in the NHS, he travels first to the then-Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa , and later to the Gilbert Islands, a pacific paradise brimming with drunken expatriates, eccentrics and lunatics.