Michael O'Donnell

Michael O'Donnell (born c 1928), is a British physician, journalist and broadcaster.

He was born in Yorkshire, the son of a rural General Practitioner, and educated at Stonyhurst College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied medicine. He joined Footlights and appeared in La Vie Cambridgienne (1948), the first Footlights revue broadcast on the BBC. He completed his clinical training at St Thomas' Hospital.

After eight years in general practice in London and Surrey, he made the decision to do something different, and started writing for various organisations including the BBC, the J Walter Thompson advertising agency and the newly-started periodical World Medicine, a publication he edited from 1966 to 1982. He was also a long-standing columnist on the British Medical Journal. O'Donnell was a member of the General Medical Council (1971-96), chairing the Standards Committee. However, his iconoclastic and skeptical style did not fit with the more conservative elements of the BMJ and the GMC, which he has described as 'a self-protective organization representing the mediocrity in the profession...Perhaps we should abolish it; just quietly dispose of it.'  While he is still an occasional contributor to the BMJ, he left the GMC in 1996. At the time of his departure, he was its longest-serving member.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he established his second career as a writer and broadcaster, publishing two novels, and presenting over a hundred TV and radio documentaries, usually, but not exclusively, on some aspects of medicine. On Radio 4 he was last chairman of My Word, (1987-90), presenter of the award-winning series Relative Values and a regular contributor to Stop The Week. He continues to produce both fiction and non-fiction works.

Select Bibliography

 * Doctor! Doctor! An Insider's Guide to the Games Doctors Play (Orion 1986)
 * How to Succeed in Business Without Sacrificing Your Health (Gollancz 1988)
 * A Skeptic's Medical Dictionary (BMJ Publishing Group 1997)
 * Medicine's Strangest Cases (Robson Books 2002)
 * Dr Donovan's Bequest: Tales from the Slagthorpe Archive (Matador 2006)