‘For every problem there is a solution: neat, plausible and wrong’. Mark Twain

Biography

James Le Fanu was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Scotland, East Africa, Yugoslavia and Cyprus. He studied the Humanities at Ampleforth College before switching to medicine, graduating from Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974. He subsequently worked in the Renal Transplant Unit and Cardiology Departments of the Royal Free and St Mary’s Hospital in London. For the past twenty years he has combined working as a doctor in general practice with contributing a weekly column to the Sunday and Daily Telegraph. He has contributed articles and reviews to The New Statesman, Spectator, GQ, The British Medical Journal and Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. He has written several books including ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’ that won the Los Angeles Prize Book Award in 2001 and ‘Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves’ that was published in Britain and the United States in February 2009.

He has made original contributions to current controversies over the value of experiments in human embryos, environmentalism, dietary causes of disease and the misdiagnosis of Non Accidental Injury in children. He is married to the publisher Juliet Annan, has two children Frederick and Allegra, and lives in south London.

To contact James, please send an email.