The Good European

IAIN BAMFORTH graduated from medical school at Glasgow University in 1982, and has since followed an idiosyncratic career which at one point took him from a position as chief resident in the American Hospital of Paris to a year in a base hospital in the Australian outback. Besides working as a general practitioner, he has also been a scientific translator and editor, literary journalist and lecturer in comparative literature. He has published three books of poetry with Carcanet, and a literary history of medicine, The Body in the Library with Verso. His varied interests have finally led him to Strasbourg, where he currently lives with his German wife and two children when not working as a health consultant in rural areas of Asia.