Tony Smith

When Tony Smith qualified in 1959 the medical enlightenment was still far away, for doctors and laypeople. Fifty years later he had been behind many of the important changes, through his constant proselytising in medical journals, popular books, and newspapers. Thus medicine is now a subject of normal conversation; no longer are, say, patients with leukaemia fobbed off with a diagnosis of anaemia, and they are asked to help with decisions on their own treatment.

Though Tony’s first two books for the public were about family planning, he switched the emphasis to more general themes, jointly authoring The Medical Risks of Life for Penguin and The Family Health Guide for Reader’s Digest. This targeting of the public was highlighted when he became medical correspondent of the Times, at the same time as being an editor at the BMJ, throwing the journal’s influence behind developments such as David Steel’s Abortion Act and the debate over the ethical dilemmas of organ transplantation.

Born in 1934 to a working class family in Coventry, Tony was evacuated to a foster home for five years to escape the blitz, winning scholarships first to the grammar school and then to New College, Oxford, to read law under the great jurist A L Goodhart. He decided to resist the temptation to devote his life to professional bridge. He changed from law to medicine. And he went to the London Hospital for clinical training. He held a series of junior appointments, largely in peripheral hospitals that had all too recently been workhouses—postings that ensured that his career in hospital medicine would go little further, as did his refusal to care for one consultant’s private patients without payment.

Given his experience in editing the London Hospital journal and freelance work, Tony was a natural choice for assistant editor at the BMJ in October 1965. He was to work for the journal for the next 35 years. Tony never wanted any credit for his achievements. Behind the scenes he championed signed editorials; statistical evaluation of articles; and a selection committee for papers, copying the Royal Academy by naming it the “hanging committee.” He was the first Minerva, transforming the page into one of the BMJ’s most imitated features, and throughout his career he could rapidly skim an arcane article in an obscure journal and render its message in four lines. When asked how he wrote so quickly and clearly he replied, “The first million words were the worst.” In fact, throughout his career he thought long and deeply before putting down his thoughts and hardly ever needed to make any changes.

After working at the Times for some time Tony disagreed with the new editor Harold Evans. Evans wanted medicine on the front page as often as possible, but Tony thought that only big stories deserved such prominence. He was sacked from the Times in the mid-1970s, which left him heartbroken. He turned to other outlets, particularly the BMA’s Family Doctor booklets, forging an influential alliance with Dorling Kindersley and masterminding a series of illustrated popular books. Accurate but not scary and written by the best specialists, these sold in their thousands.