To those of a certain age John Fry was one of the doyens of General Practice. His book on common diseases was a staple and he was well known through the pages of the magazine Update. Ask younger colleagues however about John Fry and you will often get the reply “John who?” Perhaps this is what the author means by “Almost a Legend”. He argues that “time has tended to obscure the weight of what Fry achieved”. Fry did a lot to raise standards in general practice through his service on numerous committees and through his writing, confronting British General Practice on issues such as over prescribing, failures of communication and neglect of patient records.

To those of us who knew him, or knew of him, John Fry was the “facts and figures” man. Long before computers, if you wanted to know about the prevalence, say, of diabetes, you consulted Fry’s book. Fry of course authored or co-authored many books – over 60, and was a prolific publisher in the pages of the British Medical Journal, Lancet and many other Journals at a time when very few general practitioners were publishing. He was an evidence-based practitioner long before “Evidence Based Practice” was invented. His published observations from practice, for example, helped to debunk the whole fashion of Tonsillectomy, demonstrating a twenty-fold difference in tonsillectomy between richer and poorer communities.

This book will appeal to the student of medical history and would be of interest to those entering general practice to obtain some insight into how their specialty evolved in modern times. The book is well written and scholarly and gives the reader a real sense of the evolutionary processes affecting general practice in the mid twentieth century with the foundation of the College of General Practitioners, the emergence of departments of General Practice in medical schools and the establishment of a programme for doctors in training. Tracing Fry’s career one gets a glimpse of health care pre NHS, the establishment of the NHS and its impact on practice and the mysteries of the GP contract.

Even among those who knew of John Fry many will be unaware of his origins. Born Jacob Freitag in Poland he came to England in 1929 at the age of seven with his family. His father was also a general practitioner. The author paints a vivid but economical picture of Fry’s private life which tends to concentrate on his early years; his academic and sporting successes at school, living above the “shop” with his parents and his medical school days. I was struck by the almost surreal image the author painted of the period when Guys Hospital, where Fry was a medical student, had decamped to Kent during the war years and the Battle of Britain being waged in the skies above them - “dogfights over Sherwood Park”.

The work is well documented and there are extensive notes and references to the main text. Apart from the usual index, there is a subject index, a list of John Fry’s extensive committee work for the Royal College of General Practitioners and a Bibliography detailing some 65 books authored or coauthored by Fry, various reports and a long list of research and discussion papers published by year.

Perhaps this book describes a bygone age of the solitary practice-based researcher, but Fry’s capacity for work and the sheer extent and breadth of his research output is truly inspirational and the book is an enjoyable and informative read.