Medical Memoirs - An NZ Reading List

Recently I have been reading a few medical memoirs from way back and it got me thinking about what makes so many doctors write books. And why, as readers, we enjoy reading them so much.

So, I caught up with a GP and author, Lucy O'Hagan, to have a chat about the medical memoir genre. Last year she published her own book, Everything But The Medicine - A Doctor's Tale, which has had several great reviews and is a tale of life in general practice.

"As a doctor, you're part of someone else's story. It's a privilege," she says, but in writing her  memoir, she was also very aware of confidentiality. "I didn't want to write a story where someone could recognise themselves," she explains. And besides, part of the reason that she writes is to help her process things from her working day.

"In a way it's about the effect of those stories on me. I started by doing reflective writing," says Lucy. "But I think doctors are full of stories and often those stories are very profound. Then when you write about them, it feels authentic."

Good stories and authenticity definitely tick boxes for me as a reader, so this makes sense. 

We talk about some older medical memoirs  - Doctor in The Mountains (W Anderson), Doctor in the Sticks (D A Bathgate). And a rare female doctor memoir from the early 1900s - Back Blocks Baby Doctor by Doris Gordon. 

Many of them are by rural GPs, says Lucy, perhaps because rural doctors were often more entrenched in small communities where all human life is. And perhaps also because, they simply have more scope in terms of the cases they come across - and the stories they are exposed to. Also, says Lucy 'a little bit of it is about perhaps being heroic'. And we all love a hero when it comes to stories. 

Take Dr Anderson for instance, in his book, Doctor in the Mountains. He travels rugged terrain, weathers storms on the lake at Queenstown, hikes in the mountains - to get to patients that need him. He deals with appendicitis, tetanus, tuberculosis. He straps up broken legs and improvises with anaesthetic. To the community he served, he was absolutely essential and to us as readers, his writing is warm, modest and never judgemental. That's a good combo. 

But perhaps one of the biggest attractions of medical memoirs, to readers, is that they deal with the nitty gritty of life. Life, health, sickness, death - and they often do it in a nuanced way.  "As doctors we always want to try and fix things initially, but it's more complicated than that and sometimes you just can't," says Lucy. "It's not black and white."

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Medical Memoirs - An NZ Reading List 

Doctor in the Mountains - by W A Anderson - One of my favourite medical memoirs of "Doctor Bill" who spent years in medical practice in and around Queenstown, published 1964

Doctor in the Sticks by D A Bathgate - A memoir of life in general practice in remote areas including West Coast during the building of the Otira tunnel, published 1972

Mary Lambie: A Biography by Helen Campbell  -A biography of nurse, Mary Lambie, published in 1976

Operation Lifetime by A E Moore  - The memoirs of an NZ surgeon, published 1964

Backblocks Baby Doctor by Doris Gordon - A rare autobiography from a female doctor who graduated in the early 1900s, published in 1955

Who'd Marry A Doctor? by Elaine Grundy. This one written by a doctor's wife of time spent in the Chatham Islands where her husband was a GP, published 1968. 

You can also check out  here, Lucy O' Hagan's wonderful book, published 2025,