Acknowledgements
This book draws together many and diverse stories about people, organizations and events, and the ideas, endeavours and experiences that have connected them with me, along my songline. There are very many people acknowledged in this way, throughout the chapters. Writing about them is itself an acknowledgement of my good fortune in the insights, opportunities and enjoyment they have brought me. Rather as with authors of papers in science who have sometimes listed very many co-authors, only few of them having put pen to paper or tapped keys in preparing the manuscripts, I feel concerned not to be selective in their acknowledgement here.
Acknowledgement is also about recognizing the inspiration, enjoyment and support we have received in other ways. Words cannot adequately acknowledge and convey my gratitude and indebtedness to my family and friends, past and present. They have been my rocks. I hope I have done okay in showing them that.
There have been some friends and colleagues who were especially close by, and without whom the songline of the book might easily have played out very differently. Chris Mullard, my early childhood friend, is family with us, still. John and Diane Bailey have been the most inspiring, stalwart and sustaining of friends here in St Albans over half a century.
I have had some great teachers; we owe our teachers so much. My primary school head teacher, Mildred Maggs, in the tiny village of Woolton Hill in Hampshire, is still occasionally an actor in my dreams: chalking up weekly arithmetic test exercises on the blackboard and warming herself near to the coke burner in the classroom, as she read from books to the assembled pupils at the end of the school day! My maths teacher at the Cathedral School in Bristol, Dai Davies, showed me the difference between getting to a problem solution and getting to it clearly, concisely and elegantly, using the best available methods for the task. My lovably eccentric head teacher, Cecil Rich, kept me tuned to classical education while my eyes turned to maths and science. At Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where I then alighted, James Griffiths gently cajoled and pointed the way through physics tutorials, and the altogether complementary Dirk ter Haar, entrained us to keep going in solving the taxing problems of theoretical physics that he threw our way, flamboyantly scribbling down his own solutions, chalk on blackboard or pencil on paper as he spoke, before his students’ goggling eyes. Geoff Redman, Robin Muers, Ian Phillips and Duncan Gallie were neighbours and good friends at Magdalen, who have stayed in touch to this day.
In later years, Stephen Montgomery took care of me as I transferred chaotically from my early career in the medical engineering industry to doctoral research in medical computing at University College London. John Clifton then introduced me into the world of medical physics, where Andrew Todd-Pokropek and David Delpy were colleagues who remained nearby over many of the following years, as their academic careers in medical imaging and clinical measurement methods prospered. John Dickinson and Jo Milan, who are remembered in the book’s dedication and who feature in several of its chapters, entered my songline at that time, in the early 1970s, as did Christopher Taylor who was embarking on his stellar work in medical imaging, at Manchester.
I worked at two great institutions in my subsequent academic career. The Medical College of St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Bart’s) in London and the Medical School of University College London (UCL). I owe special acknowledgement to these iconic communities and to the Deans and Provosts who had me under their wings there. The many acknowledgements due in relation to the second half of my academic career, at UCL, are covered very widely in the text and further drawn together in the additional resources archive.1 Reggie Shooter was my first Dean at Bart’s. He used to tease me as to what on earth I was doing there, and secretly shepherded me along the way! Lesley Rees (1942–2022), my last Dean there, was hugely supportive and facilitating of my career. She was the first woman Dean of Bart’s, and conferred on me, as her first professorial appointment, the first chair in Medical Informatics in the UK, that linked information technology and health care. It was notable that even though information technology (IT) was predominantly a male professional domain, it was often women colleagues, perhaps sensitive about the struggles they themselves faced in gaining senior academic position, who best understood the struggles involved in simultaneously carving out a career and creating a new field. With John Dickinson, Lesley backed me to take on important new leadership roles for the Medical College, which helped lift my career to a different plane. Jim Malpas, Mal Salkind, Gerry Slavin, Paul Turner and Donald Jeffries, as professorial seniors, Celia Burrage, David Perret, Huw Llewelyn and Andrew Gorsuch, as Medical Unit colleagues, and Sam Heard, Lesley Southgate, Jane Dacre and Peter Cull, the famous medical artist, also in charge of educational support services, were great colleagues through those career-forming years.
Two other very significant acknowledgements are due here, which I express simply. They are of my indebtedness to the hugely consequential and inspirational, now evolving worldwide communities of openEHR and OpenEyes. These started in the Dreamings of ones and twos, grew to tens of key creators and anchors, then to hundreds of engaged implementers and adopters, and are now climbing to many thousands. They are the ones showing how such movements can catch a moment, internationally, and contribute widely to the reinvention of health care in society, which the advent of the computer has both enabled and necessitated. All these wonderful people have inspired me with their staying power and vitality and are one of the principal reasons why I have felt determined and energized to write this book.
The book has been taxing to envisage, scope and write. Indeed, writing it has played a large part in discovering how to write it, and hence its three substantive drafts over three years of solid efforts–more learning by doing! It was a tiring and revealing process but, at the same time, one that had to be attempted or forgotten. If forgotten, it would have quickly disappeared over the horizon and beneath the waves. As a unique eyewitness history, that would have been a pity. I have had the support of nine professional colleagues who have read and advised on different drafts of the manuscript. Unsurprisingly they have not always concurred–with one another or with me! The many appreciative and supportive comments they provided have encouraged and spurred me on to complete the book.
My longstanding nearby St Albans friends, John and Diane Bailey–well-read English language and literature teachers and leaders in school, college and adult learning education–read sections of my early attempts to pitch the language and tone of the book, discussing and advising about its interest, relevance and accessibility to wider audiences. My former doctoral student and now good friend, Seref Arikan, did me the huge service of reading for style, content and accessibility, from the earliest drafts, chapter by chapter. He brought the capable knowledge of a developer of health computing systems over thirty years, and experience from his insightful, much downloaded UCL PhD with me, in the field. Jeannette Murphy and Evelyn Hovenga have read from educational perspectives; Martin Severs, Bill Aylward and Norbert Graf from international organization and governance, medical science, clinical practice and management perspectives; Georgios Stamatakos and Alan Rector from computer science, mathematical modelling and formal logic perspectives. All these reviewers have variously approved, put me right, reassured and criticised me for the content they reviewed–in its correctness, balance of personal and professional perspective, length and accessibility. I am indebted to them all for their advice and guidance.
The final form has been adjusted with guidance from Open Book Publishers (OBP), as to what is in the printed book and e-books, and downloadable online, and the connectivity with the book’s archive of additional resources kept online. I am indebted to the OBP founders and directors, Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti, their independent peerreviewers of the manuscript, and the OBP team–Jeevan Nagpal, Laura Rodriguez Pupo, Cameron Craig and Adèle Kreager. They have been patient, cheerful, clear, prompt, helpful and supportive. No author could ask for more. It has been a huge benefit to have the final manuscript copy-edited by a publisher traditionally centred in the humanities. Adèle has caught many mistakes in my manuscript, tidied awkward phrasing to achieve greater clarity, and chased down, corrected and completed incomplete citations. I applaud their mission and hope that the book does well for them. It was a tricky challenge to prepare the diagrams and photos to a quality suitable for printing. Tony Briscoe, a professional photographer and local friend in St Albans, very generously took my source materials to his studio and computers and transformed them into book and archive material that solved the problems as best possible. Recognizing that the book was being written and published open access, Tony waived his fees. The costs incurred for book production and making it available open-access, have been generously supported by a crowd-funding appeal. All contributors, at the time of publication and later, are and will be acknowledged, in the book itself and its updating archive of additional resources.
Regarding what the book now contains, of course the buck stops with me. I hope it is interesting and useful, as well as thought-provoking and controversial. As I wrote at the end of the Preface, nothing useful could be written about this very complex, wide-ranging, and rapidly evolving field, that was not!
I have given it my best, but, as with dancing, there is always much room for reinterpretation and improvement! The principal reason it now exists at all has been Bożena’s love and support–wanting me to write it and ensuring in a million everyday ways that I could and did. She keeps us dancing.