John James

John Anthony James was a fortunate man (very much in the mould of John Berger's book A Fortunate Man-The Story of a Country Doctor ). He was born to a GP father practising in Birmingham, and he became a GP himself, mainly working at Montpellier Health Centre in Bristol. The breadth of his interests, however, is shown by the fact that he was also visiting professor of primary care, Capital University, Beijing; visiting fellow at the School of Public Health, Harvard; and clinical tutor in child health at the University of Bristol. This was as well as doing endless overseas contracts with Ken Grant at the Health and Life Sciences Partnership (HLSP) and subsequently with Mott MacDonald when it took over HLSP. He carried out research and wrote papers on subjects including the effects of poverty, vitamin D deficiency, and iron deficiency anaemia.

However, to slightly misquote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in relation to John: "The life of a person is not what actually happened, but...