James Le Fanu

James Le Fanu (born 1950) is a British physician, medical journalist and author of several books. He is best known for his weekly columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph.

He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974, and then worked in the Renal Transplant Unit and Cardiology Departments of the Royal Free Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital in London. For the last 20 years, he has been a doctor in general practice. Le Fanu is also a medical journalist and has written articles and reviews both for medical journals such as the British Medical Journal and for magazines, and weekly columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, for which he is best known.

Le Fanu is also an author. His books include The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which won the Los Angeles Prize Book Award in 2001, and Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (2009).

In his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, Le Fanu claims that from the 1930s until the mid-1970s was the "Golden Age" for medicine, due to smaller groups of researchers working with rudimentary technology and without modern sophisticated biological knowledge and that since then "the fall of medicine" has occurred. He sees this due to the number of cures declining at the same time as new scientific knowledge of human biology was improving. He further claims that while industrialised medicine has improved because of technological advances, at the same time the costs have increased hugely. Other reasons he lists for the fall of medicine include his argument that medicine has become too centred on a movement he calls "The New Genetics"; he further links the fall of medicine to the "social theory" of public health, such as the work of Ancel Keys in the 1950s.

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