My mentor in the United States was the great Dr John Kirklin, who launched open heart surgery with the heart–lung machine. Towards the end of his distinguished career he wrote: After many years of cardiac surgery, with many tests and challenges, and after many deaths that could not then be prevented, we tend gradually to become a little weary and, in some sense, infinitely sad because of life’s inevitabilities. I wrote this book because I’ve reached that same point in a career spanning the rise and fall of the NHS. Hence my acknowledgements are as emotionally charged as the rest of the text.
