Michael O’Donnell: medical journalist, author, broadcaster, and GMC reformer

As editor of World Medicine, Michael O’Donnell was an outstanding radical journalist. Stephen Lock, a former editor of The BMJ, ranked him alongside William Cobbett (1763-1835), Thomas Wakley (1795-1862), William Morris (1834-96), and George Orwell (1903-50) in terms of zest, wit, readability, and purpose.

Wakley is perhaps the most appropriate comparator. Founder editor of the Lancet in 1823, Wakley attacked nepotism, malpractice, and quackery—“the canker worm which eats into the heart of the medical body.” O’Donnell’s canker worm was the General Medical Council and a profession where power was exerted largely through “a mixture of patronage and politesse.”

Both men were renowned innovators. While the Lancet was—among other things—the first periodical with a chess column, World Medicine—medicine’s Private Eye—broke new ground by reflecting “the uncertainties, the paradoxes, and the black comedy that make practising our craft so rewarding.”