The Turnstone

In this vivid and compelling memoir, Dr. Geoffrey Dean tells the story of his lifetime of travel, medical practice, and groundbreaking research. Born in Wales in 1918, Dean spent his early years in the north of England. After training to be a doctor in Liverpool, he served during the Second World War as a medical officer in Bomber Command. Following the war, as he recounts here, Dean relocated himself and his family to South Africa, where he established a busy medical practice that he continued for more than twenty years. During this period, he kept at the forefront of medical research, devoting the bulk of his attention to the epidemiology of porphyria, a disease that causes paralysis. All the while, his work kept him traveling, with stops in China, Sweden, Holland, Cyprus, and Spain—including a period as the personal physician to the millionaire governor of the Fiji Islands. Threaded through with surprising adventures and rich anecdotes of the author's travels in the course of his research, The Turnstone is a lively account of the life of a man whose commitment to medicine brought him to the ends of the earth—and kept him there for more than sixty years.