Choosing people: an aspect of the life of Lord Moran (1882-1977).

To the world at large, Lord Moran was the doctor who looked after Winston Churchill, and who precipitated a storm ofcomment when he published an account of the illnesses ofhis recently dead patient in 1966.1 But Charles Moran contributed to his times, and to posterity, in several other roles. A few surviving soldiers of the First World War, in their great age, remember him as a doctor who looked after them in a long posting at the front in France. To many people who paused to think of things like morale and leadership between the wars, he was the man who embodied the observations he made in France in lectures and later in a book called The anatomy of courage.2 In the 1930s almost all senior British army officers must have heard him speak on these subjects. To those concerned with medical education, he was the man who, on his return from the First World War, rebuilt St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London and sought to people it according to his very personal vision. To those involved in the politics of health, he was President of the Royal College of Physicians of London from 1941 to 1950, a period critical for the start of the National Health Service. To some in the British Medical Association at this time, to the delight of those who thought him devious, and the equal delight of those who saw him as a consummate politician, he was Corkscrew Charlie. When an octogenarian precipitates a controversy of the kind and size that Lord Moran did in 1966, all that went before may be dismissed if not forgotten. I set out, in writing his biography,3 to explore what went before, not least because much of it seemed still to have relevance for education, the design of health services and for notions of leadership. Lord Moran taught me, as a medical student, that you cannot really understand people until you have unravelled what we doctors call, in the context of our patients, "the past history".