In good medical tradition the author approaches the doctor’s problem – take history, make examination, and select a treatment. To help him, he has taken some allies: medical students. They appear in this book as a group of fourteen students, one of several groups, all of whom are at that stage of their medical education where they first approach the bedsides of the sick in their teaching hospital, which is about half way through the course. So they are aged around 20 to 22, ten are men, four are women, and they are all nicely keyed-up at this most exciting time in a long drag of study. As Moore implies, it’s almost their book. But not quite.

Some surprises appear early. The author comes, not from one of the new departments of Community Health, not from the teaching arm of the College of Practitioners, still less from the Doctors’ Reform Society. Mr Moore M. S., F. R. A. C. S., is Senior Lecturer in Surgery at the hard-to-shake centre of the medical teaching establishment, The Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Next, he commences his writing with the startling sentence, ‘There is something sinister about present day medical education’. ‘Sinister’ is a strong word to throw at any educational process, rather more so at Medicine, since the graduate is actually going to lay hands on his fellows. Sinister or not, Dr Moore sees at least one consequence of current medical education which he deplores, and that is the neglect, even now the complete loss of art in the application of medicine. He sees its practitioners left with the bony skeleton of medical science and nothing more, and he hears it being rattled at the bedside like a wordless talisman. Worst of all he knows that this sort of doctoring yields a low rate of healing. ‘Doctors and Nurses are practical people’ he writes. That means, among other things, that they want results, and so in the end it is probably the shocking waste of ill-applied medicine which he sees as ‘sinister’.

Practical, and apparently persuasive, Dr Moore found his way into the teaching curriculum within his hospital with a course of his own design which he called Medical Humanities. In brief, it was based upon a series of six-weekly group studies of literature and graphic art which illuminated the world of the sick, the unhappy, the disturbed, in such a way that the doctor-attendant might see his role with greater accuracy, might see the patients’ image of him as a healer, might understand what the sufferer really needed of him. The tenets of basic medical science were not to be put at risk, but were to be the weapons of a healer who never forgot that his subject remained that indefinable, weirdly complex and often ridiculous organism, a mortal human. Nor was the doctor to forget that he too was of the same clay.

The sessions were recorded ‘live’ and scripted as they came off the machine. A notable piece of secretarial expertise. The author, at times harassed, is a fair and competent Chairman.

Dr Moore, who holds an Honorary Arts degree in literature and philosophy (Cambridge) obviously enjoyed his own field days selecting the texts for study and discussion. Too numerous to list here – some eighty of them – he throws up at his students the writings from Charles Lamb to Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy to Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn to Sinclair Lewis. The book is largely an account of the students’ responses.

The reader can do one of two things. He can apply himself to the texts and join the discussions; or he can sit back and just listen to fourteen students. This reviewer preferred the latter. For here it all is: the indignations, the over-convictions, the violent questioning, the querulousness and incredulity. Also the earnestness, the honesty and the tenderness. All the delights of lively but not-yet organised minds. Humor there is, mainly the students’ interjections. For instance, the Chairman: ‘We must not run away from this problem of sexuality’. Woman student: ‘Who’s running’. Humor from the chair is a little heavier – ‘puberty can be a hair-raising experience’: steady Doctor!

Between the sessional accounts, the author has placed some reflective essays of his own, which dismiss completely any notion that Anthony Moore might be a medical radical, or a surgeon turned maverick teacher. His professional attitudes are solidly orthodox, his ethical concepts quite traditional.

Putting the book down, one thing appears certain. Moor, the teacher, will undoubtedly go on with his idea – that a medical student entering his hospital years with just a shiny stethoscope and some textbooks of clinical designs is at grave risk of never being able to heal. His own methodology for lessening this risk, even in its present innovative form, requires appreciable time from teacher and student. ‘Fitting things into the course’ without killing students and staff always runs into the time factor. How much time can be taken from medicine, surgery, pathology, obstetrics etc., to give to these other things? It will depend upon what sort of doctors we want. Or more likely what sort of doctors their teachers want. Which takes the reader back to Anthony Moore's opening sentence.

Because an educational theory has found a skillful practitioner, the book is also an enjoyable read, especially if you like students, and no matter whether you dislike your doctor or love him dearly.