Where Angels Fear to Tread: My Life in Medicine and Minding Other People's Business

This is an autobiography with a difference an unapologetic justification for asking questions and never being satisfied with unsupported expert opinion. The author now aged seventy-seven counts himself fortunate to have lived in this time of unprecedented scientific advance. But when wandering into areas outside medicine-for example the law and archeology-he is less sanguine over what he sees. He treasures the opportunities retirement has offered him and describes his life with an acerbic wit as he takes the reader through his erratic voyages of exploration. These range from fighting psychopathic bosses and WHO guidelines to searching for Chinas missing impact craters to fighting for justice in obvious travesties in Italy and those that framed Stefan Kiszko in the UK and put Darlie Routier on death row in Texas. He argues that mans collective psychopathology may have selected by balanced polymorphism for amygdala dysfunction leading to a state where the most empathy-deficient hold most of the positions of power. The book is lightened by many entertaining anecdotes and illustrations including sketches by the author and an appendix of poetry and North Country recitations to which he is addicted.