Bernard Murphy, Editor
International Markets and Investigations
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Portraiture: Kess Bohan & Salina Christmas |
Enter, long ago in Spain, an engineering undergraduate bunking off calculus to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Orwell. That might say it all – bar a key event, a catalyst.
Great Expectations explains those UK industry annual review titles; and Clinica and Shakespeare are such disparate vehicles – but of the same realities! Then 1984 is about that brave new technology-driven world that we are still increasingly recognising, also through medical advances: scanning, monitoring, testing, genetics, databases. 1984 was also a milestone year on the path to Clinica, as I embarked on a career in languages.
Five years later, as I began to hone my perception and definitions of human progress – teaching prison inmates and university students alike – my medtech destiny was sealed when asked to switch off a life-support machine....
Over the following decade, that perception was to become more acute. And now, a further nine years since joining Clinica, my editor occasionally comments on my passion for the title.
It is wholehearted. But here is the best place to explain, for the first time, that it wasn't all altruism. Suffice to say that a 21st-century Hamlet would not have stopped at finding the truth of his father's death... of the series of adverse events and questionable access to brain scanning.
And so, to come full circle, it should be that, as we see the profile of health and healthcare being raised, increasingly meeting some of humanity's most basic needs, Clinica will, in time, surface in a semi-autobiographical novel, written under my pseudonym, in Spanish first, then maybe in languages I will never speak.
The rest is all time and space: my son, now the epicentre; family and friends I don't see enough of; running for Swansea and Wales (will a lap of hurdles ever again be faster than a "minute's worth of distance run"?); and, eternally, the rocks and trees and peaks of "the snow-covered island" in the Atlantic.
