Nathaniel Aspray is a GP in Basingstoke and a National Institute for Health and Care Research In-Practice Fellow with the Migrant Health Research Group at City St George’s University of London.
I recently finished my first (and probably last) reading of Ulysses, widely considered modernist Irish author James Joyce’s magnum opus, and often rated as the second hardest English language novel to read. (Finnegans Wake, another of Joyce’s books, is generally thought to be the hardest). Joyce pioneered the ‘stream of consciousness’ writing style, setting Ulysses over the 24 hours of Thursday 16 June 1904; (though it was first reviewed in the BJGP in 20151).
To avoid this appearing as a self-congratulatory publication of my own literary exploits, it’s important to contextualise my achievement in the length of time it took me to read — roughly 18 months. During the time I spent trudging through the 930 pages my 1960s edition contained,2 I estimate that I held 7000 GP consultations of somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, giving a very rough estimate of 2400 hours of consultation time, or enough to fill 100 Ulysseses.
What is there to be gained in comparing my 100 days with patients to Ulysses’ protagonist Leopold Bloom’s 1 day wandering around Dublin? Maybe just this: one of the beauties of Ulysses is in Joyce’s ability to ‘foreground the process of thinking’,3 with Bloom’s subconscious overflowing the text and encouraging the reader to consider the depth of experience contained in a single moment (consider also William Blake’s ‘world in a grain of sand’4). By the same token, I find myself considering just how much must be contained in a single consultation, each inflection and shift in body language, all the baggage that both the patient and the doctor bring into the room, both of our consciousnesses trying to work in unison to understand and be understood.
Would I recommend Ulysses to a GP colleague? As a challenging read and a slow antidote to the nature of our rapid and fragmented working days; and maybe to serve as a reminder of how much goes unspoken during those precious 15 minutes, yes.
As Bloom tells us during his visit to the chemist, ‘Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.’
References
1. Salinsky J. BJGP Library: Ulysses. Br J Gen Pract 2015; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp15X687505.
2. Joyce J. Ulysses. New York City, NY: Vintage Books, 1966.
3. Kiberd D. Ulysses, modernism’s most sociable masterpiece. The Guardian 2009; 16 Jun: http://theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/16/jamesjoyce-classics (accessed 22 Aug 2025).
4. Blake W. Auguries of Innocence. In: Gilchrist A. The Life of William Blake. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1928.
Featured photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash.
