Sir Christopher Charles Booth (22 June 1924 – 13 July 2012) was an Englishclinician andmedical historian, characterised as "one of the great characters of British medicine".

Booth was born in 1924 inFarnham,Surrey. His father Lionel Booth is credited as the inventor of the telephoto lens. He was brought up inWensleydale,Yorkshire and attendedSedbergh school.^[1]

He served as a frogman in the Royal Navy from 1942. A Navy doctor encouraged him to study medicine, so he enrolled at theBute Medical School of theUniversity of St. Andrews ondemobilisation and graduated in 1951, serving as a houseman in Dundee before moving to the postgraduate medical school atHammersmith hospital inLondon. His MD was awarded in 1958 for work showing thatVitamin B12 is absorbed at the far end of the small intestine, work for which he also received theRutherford gold medal.^[2]

His medical speciality wasgastroenterology and he was a founder ofCoeliac UK. He was also director of theMedical Research Council Clinical Research Centre atNorthwick Park and research director at theWellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. He was president of theBritish Medical Association from 1986 to 1987 and president of theRoyal Society of Medicine from 1988 to 1990.^[2]

Booth defended,Chris Pallis, a neurologist working under him atHammersmith Hospital, when he was attacked for his left-wing views.^[3] He was also an outspoken, on one occasion noting that taking the doctors' pay demand to the then prime minister,Margaret Thatcher, would be not a red rag to a bull, as a colleague suggested, but "a red rag to an old cow".^[1]

He published four books and 50 papers on the history of medicine, and played a leading role in the founding of theHistory of Modern Biomedicine Research Group.

A ward at the Hammersmith Hospital is named after him and looks after gastroenterology patients.

He married three times; firstlyLavinia Loughridge, with whom he had a son and daughter, secondlyProfessor Soad Tabaqchali, with whom he had another daughter and lastly Joyce Singleton, who survived him.^[2]

• Honorary Fellow,American College of Physicians, 1973
• Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite, 1977
• HonoraryLLD,University of Dundee, 1982
• International member,American Philosophical Society, 1981^[4]
• Honorary Fellow,Royal Society of Medicine, 1991
• Knighted for services to medicine in 1982

• Biographical data,Debrett's

• Portrait at theNational Portrait Gallery
• Christopher Booth on theHistory of Modern Biomedicine Research Group website