Archibald Joseph Cronin (Cronogue) (19 July 1896 – 6 January 1981) was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known novel is The Citadel (1937), about a Scottish physician who serves in a Welsh mining village, and then moves into a highly paid private practice in London where he becomes disillusioned with the greed and incompetence of some doctors. In writing the book, Cronin utilized his experiences both as a medical inspector of mines, and a physician on Harley Street. The Citadel exposed unfairness in British medicine and helped inspire the National Health Service.
The Stars Look Down, set in the North East of England, is another of his best-selling novels that used his first-hand knowledge of mining communities. The book's success prompted a film adaptation, as did The Citadel, Hatter's Castle, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years. Cronin's 1935 novella Country Doctor was turned into a long-running BBC radio and TV series, Dr. Finlay's Casebook (1962–1971), set in the 1920s. There was a follow-up series in 1993–1996.
Archibald Joseph Cronin was born in Cardross, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the only child of a Presbyterian mother, Jessie Cronin (née Montgomerie), and a Catholic father, Patrick Cronin. The future novelist often wrote of young men from similarly mixed backgrounds. His maternal grandfather, Archibald Montgomerie, was a hatter who owned a shop in Dumbarton. His paternal grandparents had emigrated from County Armagh, Ireland, and become glass and china merchants in Alexandria. His grandfather Owen Cronin (Cronogue) had his surname changed from Cronogue in 1870. Not long after their marriage, Cronin's parents settled in Helensburgh, where their son attended Grant Street School. When A. J. was seven years old, his father, an insurance agent and commercial traveller, died of tuberculosis. His mother moved the family to her parents' home in Dumbarton, and she later became the first female public health inspector in Glasgow.
Cronin was not only a precocious student at Dumbarton Academy, who won prizes in writing competitions, but an excellent athlete and association footballer. From an early age he was an avid golfer, and he enjoyed the sport throughout his life. His family then moved to Yorkhill, Glasgow, where he attended St Aloysius' College in the Garnethill area of the city. He played football for the St Aloysius' First XI, an experience he included in one of his last novels, The Minstrel Boy.
A family wish that Cronin should either study for the priesthood or practise medicine was decided by him when he chose "the lesser of two evils". He won a Carnegie scholarship to study medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1914. Having been absent in 1916–1917 for naval service, he graduated in 1919 with highest honours when obtaining the degree of MBChB. Later that year he visited India as ship's surgeon on a liner. Cronin went on to earn additional qualifications, including a Diploma in Public Health (1923) and Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (1924). In 1925 he gained an MD at the University of Glasgow with a dissertation titled "The History of Aneurysm".
During the First World War, Cronin served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating from medical school. After the war he trained at hospitals that included Bellahouston Hospital and Lightburn Hospital in Glasgow and the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. He undertook general practice at Garelochhead, a village on the River Clyde, and in Tredegar, a mining town in South Wales.
In 1924 he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain. His survey of medical regulations in collieries and his reports on the correlation between coal-dust inhalation and pulmonary disease were published over the next few years. He later drew on his medical experiences and his research into the occupational hazards of the mining industry when writing The Stars Look Down set in Northumberland, and The Citadel set in Wales. Cronin subsequently moved to London, where he practised on Harley Street before opening a busy medical practise in Notting Hill. He was also working as medical officer for Whiteleys department store. During this time he showed an increasing interest in ophthalmology, and considered specializing in opthalmic surgery.
In 1930 Cronin was diagnosed with a chronic duodenal ulcer and told to take six months' complete rest in the country on a milk diet. At Dalchenna Farm near Loch Fyne he was finally able to indulge a lifelong desire to write a novel, having previously "written nothing but prescriptions and scientific papers." He travelled to Dumbarton to conduct research for his first novel, using files from Dumbarton Library, which still has a letter from him requesting advice. He composed Hatter's Castle in three months and quickly had it accepted by Gollancz, the only publisher to which he submitted it, apparently after his wife had randomly stuck a pin in a list of publishers. It was an immediate success and launched Cronin's career as an author. He never returned to medicine.
Many of Cronin's novels were best-sellers that were translated into multiple languages. His works often dramatically mix realism, romance and social criticism, in which protagonists pursue justice for the common man, and in so doing reveal moral conflicts between the individual and society. For example, The Stars Look Down (1935) chronicles transgressions in a mining community in north-east England and an idealistic miner's rise to be a Member of Parliament (MP).
A prodigiously fast writer, Cronin liked to average 5,000 words a day, meticulously planning the details of his plots in advance. He was known to be tough in business dealings, although in private life he was a person whose "pawky humour... peppered his conversations," according to one of his editors, Peter Haining.
Cronin also contributed stories and essays to various international publications. During the Second World War he worked for the British Ministry of Information, writing articles as well as participating in radio broadcasts to foreign countries.
The Citadel (1937), a tale of a doctor's struggle to balance scientific integrity with social obligations, helped to promote the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom by exposing the inequity, incompetence and corruption in the medical system. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service to defeat the wiles of doctors who "raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form." Cronin and Aneurin Bevan had both worked at the Tredegar Cottage Hospital in Wales, which served as one of the models for the NHS. Cronin made enemies in the medical profession, and there was a concerted effort by one group of specialists to get The Citadel banned. Nevertheless, the novel became the highest-selling book ever published by Gollancz, and eventually led to healthcare reform. Not only were the author's pioneering ideas instrumental in creating the NHS, but according to historian Raphael Samuel, the popularity of Cronin's novels played a role in the Labour Party's landslide victory in 1945.
By contrast, one of Cronin's biographers, Alan Davies, called the book's reception mixed. A few of the more vociferous medical practitioners of the day took exception to one of its many messages: that a few well-heeled doctors in fashionable practices were unethically extracting large amounts of money from their equally well-off patients. Some pointed to a lack of balance between criticism and praise for hard-working doctors. The majority accepted it for what it was, a topical novel. The press tried to incite passions within the profession in an attempt to sell copy, while Victor Gollancz followed suit in an attempt to promote the book – both overlooking that it was a work of fiction, not a scientific piece of research, and not autobiographical.
In the United States The Citadel won the National Book Award, Favorite Fiction of 1937, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. According to a Gallup poll taken in 1939, The Citadel was voted the most interesting book readers had ever read.