Medicine

As I read Rod Griffiths ’ fascinating account of a career in public health, I was immediately struck by the parallels with my own. Like him, I had been pursuing a clinical career before moving to public health. In my case the conversion came when, in my outpatient clinic in Belfast in the 1980s, I was confronted with patients living in the community whose diet was so inadequate that they developed beriberi and scurvy, while in one of my wards 80 % of the patients had some complication of alcoholism. It was not clear how the research I was undertaking on peptide biochemistry was going to be of immediate help to them. My career, too, has been shaped by events elsewhere. In 1989 I was appointed as a senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tasked with developing a pro-gramme of research in Europe that would complement the school’s traditional work in low income countries. In the interva