Casting a Cold Eye, on Life on Death.
Doctor, thinker, entrepreneur, activist, chief executive, but probably best known to an entire cohort of doctors as the editor to the BMJ. A man who inspired a generation.
“Richard Smith is primarily known for what he is not: he is not the editor of the BMJ, but he once was; and he is not Arthur Smith, the stand up comedian and “grumpy old man” but his brother. Smith graduated in medicine from Edinburgh Medical School and did junior house jobs in Scotland and New Zealand.
In 1979 he became an assistant editor at the BMJ, writing series of articles on alcohol and health, prison health care, unemployment and health, research policy, and the General Medical Council. While at the BMJ he also worked as the BBC Breakfast Time doctor, and later worked as the doctor for TV-AM. He had bizarre experiences with both.
After a year at the Stanford Business School in California, a year that had a big influence on him, he became the editor of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ publishing Group. After 25 years at the BMJ he left to become the chief executive of UnitedHealth Europe, a job he did not enjoy. Within a few years, however, he became the UnitedHealth director of programme with the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to create 11 centres in low and middle income countries to build capacity, do research, and advise on policy in relation to non-communicable disease.
After that, he was for six years the chair of icddr,b [formerly the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease, Bangladesh], perhaps the most challenging job of his career. For five years he was the co-chair of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death, and now he is the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, the Point of Care Foundation, which works to humanise care, and Patients Know Best, a company that brings together all the care records of patients and citizens and puts them under their control.
Smith enjoys hill walking, cooking, theatre, art, and music, but his biggest passion is reading. Lin, his wife, thinks that like Don Quixote he has been driven mad by too much reading. His three children and four grandchildren, who know him as “silly grandad,” find him an object of amusement.”

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