Doctor In The House

comedy, fiction · EN

Welcome back to St. Swithin’s! The misadventures of the medical students of St. Swithin’s Hospital were first introduced to the public in 1952 with the publication of Richard Gordon’s comic novel DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE. Inspired by his own time as a student at Cambridge University and St Bartholemew’s Hospital in the 1940s, Gordon’s tale was written during an idle period at sea while working as a ship’s surgeon. “I had nothing to do except drink gin with the chief engineer,” he later explained. “To save myself from developing cirrhosis of the liver, I wrote about my experiences as a medical student.” The novel was a great success, selling over three million copies and being translated into nearly twenty languages. Over the next thirty years, Richard Gordon wrote a further seventeen novels in the DOCTOR series. He also wrote a number of non-fiction books, a textbook on anaesthesiology, and was a regular contributor to Punch magazine. <