Donald William Gould
Authors: C. Richmond
Journal: BMJ (2002)

Former editor of World Medicine and New Scientist and an informed critic of medicine

Donald Gould was the first medical journalist of note and the spiritual head of an invisible college of critical medical writing. He started out in a conventional medical career, qualifying at St Thomas's, where, he said later, “the patients were little more than medical cannon fodder . . . ignorant peasants who had to be handled with the kind of paternalistic discipline to be expected in a home for wayward boys.”

He spent the next 14 years teaching in the Far East—becoming professor of physiology at the University of Malaya (Singapore)—and returned to Britain to teach physiology at St Bartholomew's for three years.


In 1963 he gave up his academic position to become a journalist, rapidly rising from deputy editor of Medical News to become editor of World Medicine. Three years later he went to edit New Scientist, which he turned from a stuffy establishment magazine into a lively one that was read and talked about by people outside as well as inside science. However, he didn't last long there: in the words of Michael O'Donnell, who succeeded him at World Medicine, “He didn't get on well with the people in the front office.” 




From 1966 to 1988, when the New Statesman was required reading among the chattering classes, he was its medical correspondent. He continued writing and being published—in New Scientist, the Guardian, the Independent, and the New Statesman—until shortly before his death. He could be tart. When it first seemed possible to prescribe the sex of babies, he wrote: “This is the sort of prognostication which some of my more sober-sided colleagues in the world of science might call alarmist. Well, it does alarm me. Supposing the developments I have suggested had been achieved half a century ago—by now I might be a fashionable lady novelist, or even a mother of 12.” He diced with deadlines, waiting till the adrenaline flowed and tempering it with Laphroaig.

The first of the serious medical critics, as distinct from those who simply knock the system of its practitioners, he wanted medicine to become open and accountable. It was said of him that he criticised medicine in the way that F R Leavis criticised literature. He contributed to or wrote forewords for several books, and towards the end of his life took to writing them, producing The Black and White Medicine Show in 1985, The Medical Mafia in 1987, Nurses in 1988, and Examining Doctors in 1991. They were constructive and fairly influential, and many of the faults that they highlighted have all but vanished from medicine thanks, at least in part, to the fact that he and others turned the spotlight on them.

His was a sparkling personality—even after his stroke, he was engaging, witty, and well informed. He married twice, each time for around 30 years. By his first wife, Jennifer, whom he married in 1940, he had three sons and four daughters. He also had a son and daughter by his second wife, Jen, whom he married in 1969. He recovered well from a stroke in 2000 but on 10 February 2002 had a subarachnoid haemorrhage that coincided with a fall on the stairs. The sexy medical thriller he was writing remains unfinished.

Donald William Gould, medical writer and editor; b 1919; q London 1942; d 13 February 2002.