Where Angels Fear to Tread

About the Book

This is an autobiography with a difference, an unapologetic justification for asking questions, and never being satisfied with unsupported “expert opinion.” The author, now aged seventy-seven, counts himself fortunate to have lived in this time of unprecedented scientific advance. But when wandering into areas outside medicine—for example, the law and archeology—he is less sanguine over what he sees. He treasures the opportunities retirement has offered him and describes his life with an acerbic wit as he takes the reader through his erratic voyages of exploration. These range from fighting psychopathic bosses and WHO guidelines, to searching for China’s missing impact craters, to fighting for justice in obvious travesties in Italy and those that framed Stefan Kiszko in the UK and put Darlie Routier on death row in Texas. He argues that man’s collective psychopathology may have selected by balanced polymorphism for amygdala dysfunction, leading to a state where the most empathy-deficient hold most of the positions of power. The book is lightened by many entertaining anecdotes and illustrations, including sketches by the author, and an appendix of poetry and North Country recitations to which he is addicted.

About the Author

David Anderson was born in 1940 into a distinguished medical, musical, military and artistic family. When his appendix was removed at the age of five by a surgeon uncle, tummy pains thereby cured, he decided to become a doctor. Qualifying in St Andrews and Dundee he became physician, endocrinologist, clinical academic and finally Professor of Medicine and Endocrinology in Manchester and Hong Kong. He holds that it is better to have enough ideas for some to be wrong than to always be right by having no ideas at all. He was a keen researcher and educator, and his medical teaching film series took him into areas at the fringes where others feared to tread. He became horrified by the triumph of bureaucracy over common sense and compassion behind nonsense guidelines for rabies prevention. Outside Medicine and in retirement he has pioneered the study of jade, agate, and natural glass from China’s Hongshan Culture and has searched for impact craters and meteoritic glass in Northern China. In retirement in Italy with his wife Jenny, he fought for justice for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. And he disputes convenient explanations over climate change, while systematic jet stream abuse remains unquestioned.