Donald William Gould

Former editor of World Medicine and New Scientist and an informed critic of medicine

Donald Gould was the first medical journalist of note and the spiritual head of an invisible college of critical medical writing. He started out in a conventional medical career, qualifying at St Thomas's, where, he said later, “the patients were little more than medical cannon fodder … ignorant peasants who had to be handled with the kind of paternalistic discipline to be expected in a home for wayward boys.”

He spent the next 14 years teaching in the Far East—becoming professor of physiology at the University of Malaya (Singapore)—and returned to Britain to teach physiology at St Bartholomew's for three …