ABSTRACT
General practice in the UK has produced a small number of books that capture its essence and deserve to be called classics. These are the books that you earnestly recommend to your GP trainees or students (‘Wonderful book, a classic, you have to read it’). The classic in question may even be sitting in some neglected corner of the practice library. But will our pupils actually take it down, dust it off and read it? To be honest, have we really, truly read it ourselves? Or is it, in the words of Italian novelist Italo Calvino, one of those ‘books that everybody else has read, so it’s as if you had read them, too.’
