Introduction to the Monograph

Sir Christopher Booth’s (June 1924 - July 2012), medical historian, Dean of Northwick Park Hospital, in London, "one of the great characters of British medicine”, is better known to us as the researcher who discovered that B12 absorption was from the distal small gut. His “Being a Patient” [1], the first chapter of the last edition of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, ought to be made compulsory reading for all doctors and medical students. He writes with sadness but with detachment about his transition from youth to old age, from a healthy carefree existence to dependence to hospital: he  reminds us how, as one gets older, disability strikes suddenly, severely, ferociously, furiously, with the person and  his family often totally unprepared.