The Vanished Pleasure of a Richard Gordon Doctor Series Book

Perhaps it was natural for me to read the Richard Gordon Doctor novels. After all, my father was a doctor and I spent a great deal of my younger years being exposed to the world of hospitals and doctors. The books are mostly quite hilarious in a bawdy sort of way but also satisfy the same desires that now lead us to watch a Doctor House or some other Hospital show. 

The films and TV dramas based on the Doctor series were fairly funny and you can find samples on You Tube.

Doctor In the House

The books will tickle your funny bone and take you on an amusing tour of the world of medicine and the private lives of doctors. While the medical fraternity will find familiar scenes, we can all enjoy the stories as all of us get to visit hospitals for one reason or another. 

Dr. Gordon was professionally adrift, working as a surgeon on a cargo ship in the South Pacific, when he began writing his first book in 1950. “I had nothing to do except drink gin with the chief engineer,” he later told the Daily Mail. “To save myself from developing cirrhosis of the liver, I wrote about my experiences as a medical student.”The result was “Doctor in the House,” a ribald comedy about a callow, rugby-playing medical student who chases women, spends nearly as much time at the bar as at the hospital and is eventually “transformed from an unearning and potentially dishonest ragamuffin to a respectable and solvent member of a learned profession.” The protagonist, like the pseudonymous author, was named Richard Gordon.The novel sold more than 3 million copies and was reportedly used to teach conversational English in Japan.

Before writing ‘Doctor in the House,’ he was a surgeon in the South Pacific

In those days there were quite a few authors who were doctors and whose writings were set in their professional world: A J Cronin, for example. I wonder why that is not the case these days ...