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Remarkably Relevant 
Written in 1937, "The Citadel" is as relevant today as it was back then. Young Dr. Andrew Manson graduates from the less prestigious University of Dundee and begins his medical career in a small Welsh mining town as the company doctor. Hard working, intelligent and idealistic, Dr. Manson questions the "old ways" of medicine practiced by his older colleagues and the dogma they espouse. Though initially met with resistance and criticism, patients soon begin to respect his integrity, his conscientiousness and his empathy for people's personal difficulties. As his career grows he leaves the mining town and builds a respectable and successful private practice.
But Dr. Manson's principles are soon compromised as he begins to associate with more affluent doctors. He begins to realize that he is able to make more money my pandering to rich patients. His ideals are slowly eroded by materialism and the influence of drug and equipment companies. His personal life is also slowly eroded by his busy schedule and his ethical lapses. Somewhere his desire to reduce suffering and improve people's lives has been shunted aside for personal success.
Author AJ Cronin brings Dr. Manson's story to a dramatic conclusion which is best left for the reader to discover. But along to way AJ Cronin touches upon many of bureaucratic problems, the resistance to change and the ethical issues which still pledge the industry today. A very insightful and heart-rending novel that I've read several times and will read several times more.
Great Read - Timeless 
I read this book only because I needed something to read and it was on my high school son's desk as part of his reading assignment. I didn't expect much, but was very surprised by the well written human drama period piece. I really enjoyed it and am very glad I read it.
Check out my newest thriller - Bound by Birth - by Randall R Wheeler
Bound By Birth
Not just a book about a doctor, for doctors
The Citadel is simply one of the best novels I have ever read. Medical doctor A.J. Cronin pens a morality tale that everyone could profit by reading. This is one of the stories I have used when counseling prospective eagle scouts, because it cuts to the heart of what it means to be a person of honor and integrity. I won't recap the plot, because that has been done in so many other reviews. Just read this book.
A few years ago I was staying in a lovely hotel in a small town in northern Scotland. The hotel's modest library contained a first edition of The Citadel. I offered to replace their tattered copy with a new book, and offered to add a few more. The hotel owner told me that book was one of his most prized possessions. Read it and you will find out why.
Fine novelistic treatment of British medicine during the 1930s
This nicely written novel by A.J. Cronin (1896-1981) is an excellent entrée into the world of British medicine in the 1920s and `30s, a world in which a character in his 50s can be described as "elderly," and in which doctors specializing in lung diseases are regularly portrayed cigarette in hand. Cronin was himself a Scottish doctor who practiced in South Wales after World War I and who, like his protagonist Andrew Mason, investigated lung diseases of miners. Much of the impressive characterization and physical description in this book has the ring of personal observation.
With considerable narrative skill, Cronin tells the familiar story of gaining the world but losing one's soul. The characters and development are mostly believable, although Mason's sudden reconversion from materialism to idealism takes a bit more willing suspension of disbelief than I'm used to providing novelists. Cronin, although not profound, introduces a number of clever touches, such as having Mason, at his materialistic nadir, excoriate his wife for reading the Gospel of Luke--St. Paul's "beloved physician."
Why should good men suffer while evil men prosper?
I am a premedical student completeing my 3rd year of college. I read this book because it was recommended to me as one of those books that aspiring doctors should read before entering the profession.
The story is a chronological account of Manson's life from his graduation from college, through his professional life as a physician in 1920's-1930's England. The book sketches Manson's change from his schoolboy idealism to cynical medical profiteer and his final return to the high ethical and medical standards with which he begun his medical career.
Throughout the book, the reader will consistently encounter two major themes. First is the resistance of the highly conservative medical establishment of the 1920's England to any sort of change illuminated by the advancement of science. Manson again and again butts heads with his fellow doctors, patients and medical societies when he uses "unorthodox" treatments that actually deliver clinical results as oppose to the cod liver oil and patented concoctions that deliver no results except to line the wallets of greedy doctors.
The second theme is the dishonesty of many in the medical establishment. By pandering to rich patients, by telling people what they want to hear, by sucking up to social elites while ignoring those in actual plight, a dishonest doctor stands to profit immensely. On the other hand, an honest doctor who delivers the sad, untolerable, but ultimately true diagnosis is shunned as a quack. Witness the rich middle class wives who are nothing but hypochondriacs mooning over charlatans promising them cures with their patented cures that are nothing but colored water. Then compare that to their shock and abhorence at Dr. Manson's abrasive but true diagnosis that the only thing wrong with them is their fat, lazy, sedamentary lives.
Being a reader or a patient it might be easy to to criticize Dr. Manson for his fall into the ranks of such evil men. However, unless one has suffered through the insanely long, difficult and expensive process of being a doctor, one cannot truly understand the frustration that Manson felt seeing less qualified colleagues who pander to patients drive in luxury automobils while he himself have barely bread to eat.
Although much has changed for the better since this book was written by A.J. Cronin in the 1930's, the reader is reminded that the same evils that existed back then exist now today. Flashy, expensive treatments pander to those diseases like aging skin and sagging [...] will ultimately have their patrons. Yet if the reader has learned anything from this book, its that the gruffy advice he gets from his physician who recommends nothing but an asprin and a good nights rest may be the least thing he wanted to hear, but will be the best and most honest advice.
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