Arpan K. Banerjee
Solihull, England

Medicine has long been a fertile training ground for those who abandon their profession to become writers. Their number includes Anton Chekhov, William Somerset Maugham, John Keats, Mikhail Bulgakov, William Carlos Williams, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Helen Ashton has been largely forgotten as one of these medically trained authors. She was born on 18 October 1891 to a distinguished family in London. Her father was a judge, and her brother became the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. She studied medicine at the Royal London Hospital in the east end and obtained her medical degree in 1922 from the University of London. She worked as a junior doctor for a few years at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital before marrying a barrister in 1927. She then retired from medical practice and spent the rest of her life as a writer. Ashton was a prolific novelist and literary biographer with a wide range of interests who wrote twenty-six books over forty years.

Ashton’s writings include works about Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister of the famous poet William Wordsworth. She also wrote about Caroline Herschel, the German astronomer whose pioneering work in the late eighteenth century was often eclipsed by her brother William. Ashton’s first three novels were written while volunteering as a nurse during the First World War. Her range of writing topics was wide, such as a book based on the life of an architect titled Bricks and Mortar was published in 1932.

Many of her books were about village life in England. Two books are of particular interest to healthcare workers, including Doctor Serocold (1930) about the life of a country doctor in England, and Yeoman’s Hospital (1944), a fictional work about twenty-four hours in a British provincial hospital in the 1940s. The human relationships, petty jealousies and squabbles, conflicting egos, frustrated ambitions, and the successes and failures of hospital care are all interwoven into a realistic account of day-to-day life in a hospital. This was later adapted into the popular British film White Corridors (1951) directed by Pat Jackson and featuring Googie Withers. The film centers around a love story between two doctors at the hospital and their attempt to save the life of a patient with an infection. Doctors did not have the all the antibiotics they use today; penicillin only came into use in the 1940s following Alexander Fleming’s discovery and Ernst Chain’s pioneering work.

Helen Ashton died in 1958. Sadly, few of her books remain in print today.

References

• Banerjee AK. “William Somerset Maugham: His Years as a Medical Student at St Thomas’ Hospital 1892-1897 and the Birth of ‘Liza of Lambeth.’” J Royal Soc Med 82, no. 1 (1989): 44-5.
• Banerjee AK. “John Keats: His Medical Student Years at the United Hospitals of Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals 1815-1816.” J Royal Soc M 82, no. 10 (1989): 620-21.
• Banerjee AK. “John Keats Statue.” Hektoen International, Winter 2024. https://hekint.org/2024/01/16/john-keats-statue/ed
• Banerjee AK. “Ten medically trained authors whose books all doctors should read.” OUP Blog, Dec 19, 2014. https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/author-doctor-reading-list/