Book review: Man and Boy

Harry Silver "makes a mistake" with a girl at work. He then loses his wife and his job and becomes a single parent-all in the space of a few days. As he learns to bring up his son alone he starts to appreciate, among other things, the father-son bond, and he begins to realise what makes his own father so special. Indeed, the relationship they have is both extremely moving and very realistic.

Harry, like all of us, experiences life's greatest milestones in the hands of doctors-the great joy at the birth of his son, Pat, and the immense grief of losing a loved one, for his father is diagnosed with lung cancer.

It is easy for us in the medical profession to feel nothing but a passive sense of acceptance when reading about such a diagnosis. Many of us would not have batted an eyelid. What is often needed is some distance between ourselves and the "medical side" of our brains. We need to look carefully at the situation from the patient's point of view rather than just know what that point of view is. We need to think what impact the patient's condition has on his/her life rather than thinking, "Small cell or non-small cell? Stage?" This book made me realise that we can sometimes learn the most important lessons about practising medicine from someone with no medical background at all.

But the book is also about how we behave towards people close to us. It questions our own beliefs and preconceptions. It makes us realise that we are all guilty of harbouring our own prejudices and thereby challenges them. A prime example of this is the social stigma that is often attached to single mothers. It is only when Harry realises how difficult he is finding it to look after Pat by himself that he looks upon single mothers more favourably-"after all, they're the ones that stayed."

Tony Parsons does all this through the means of an easy-to-read, very witty novel that many of us, including myself, would otherwise have overlooked because of its deserved popularity.

Amlan Basu, third year medical student, University College London
Email: a.basu@ucl.ac.uk


studentBMJ 2000;08:259-302 August ISSN 0966-6494