Confronting an Ill Society: David Widgery, general practice, idealism and the chase for change Patrick Hutt with Iona Heath and Roger Neighbour Radcliffe Publishing, 120pp, £19.95 ISBN 1857759109

David Widgery was a child of the Sixties, someone who thought he could make the world a better and fairer place. As a boy, he contracted polio and tuberculosis. The care and treatment he received from the state fostered in him a sense of gratitude and a lifelong commitment to the National Health Service. He decided to become a doctor and perform the sort of surgery that had restored his mobility. To this end, he became a student at the Royal Free medical school. Not coming from a medical background, he was uncomfortable with most of the other students and, to avoid their company, he threw himself into hard-left politics.

He scraped through medical school, passing his finals two years after most of his peers. Initially, he worked only part-time as a doctor and used the rest of his time for politics and writing. Widgery took over as editor of Oz magazine when Jim Anderson, Richard Neville and Felix Dennis went on trial. He later played a big part in Rock Against Racism and in founding the Anti-Nazi League. He abandoned his early ambition to become a surgeon and found his true vocation as a GP in Limehouse in the East End of London, where he championed the cause of the poor and needy on his patch. During this time, his twin commitments fused. He came to believe that there was a direct link between poor housing, poverty and ill-health. He felt doctors should be involved in the struggle to improve the lives and circumstances of the underprivileged.

Widgery's writing, especially when describing his patients and the conditions they lived in, is remarkable, a blend of George Orwell and Henry Mayhew:

When I came here in that fateful taxi down the Hackney Road, I didn't know what the bruised face of a heroin addict was like, or how children could be locked up without food, four in a room, by a drunken father as punishment, or what happens to a jaw when it is broken in a domestic fight and concealed. And now I do. I know what decomposed bodies of alcoholics smell like after two weeks, and the noises made when dying in pain, and what happens to a woman's face when she is told her breast cancer has spread. And I think I wish I didn't.

However, Widgery used what he found to further his political aims and seems to have had a cavalier attitude towards patient confidentiality. At one point, he was happy for his patients and himself to be tracked by a TV documentary crew.

In 1992, Widgery planned to take a year off clinical practice to fulfil a commission by Roy Porter to write a history of East End medicine. The book was never written. His life ended after he subjected his body to a cocktail of booze and barbiturates. Since the 1960s, he had taken LSD and other drugs intermittently. A legacy of his polio was near-constant pain and discomfort, making home visits to patients an increasing struggle. He worried that he would end up in a wheelchair. Some friends feel he used alcohol and drugs to deaden the pain. And he always had a romantic admiration of others who had lived on the edge and fallen off early. Sadly, he would join them at the age of 45.

Patrick Hutt has not produced a straightforward biography. Instead, he uses Widgery's life and work as a way to explore his own search for meaning in medicine. Hutt's father was also an East End GP. It is unclear how well he knew his son's subject, but he took Hutt Jr, aged 14, to a memorial service for Widgery. While at Cambridge, Hutt conducted research into the writer he had come to admire. He had privileged access to a group of people who knew Widgery well, and quotations from them pepper this book. Even though they remember Widgery with affection, it is clear that he wasn't a saint. He could be rude and abrasive, and was constantly in a hurry. Not getting the answers he had hoped for or expected, Hutt emerges sadder and wiser. The man he had unearthed was remarkable, but far from a role model.

What is most striking about this book is that it was written by such a young doctor. Hutt is wise beyond his years, and will surely have a successful career.

Peter Cross is co-author of Making it in British Medicine: essential guidance for international doctors (Radcliffe)

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