Richard Gordon (English author)

Richard Gordon, born Gordon Stanley Benton and later also known as Gordon Stanley Ostlere, was an English ship's surgeon and anaesthetist who became a best-selling writer on medical themes. Born on 15 September 1921 in Paddington, London, he studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he later worked as an anaesthetist, and he also served as a ship's surgeon and as assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. Under his own name he published technical books including Anaesthetics for Medical Students in 1949 and Trichlorethylene Anaesthesia in 1953. He left medical practice in 1952 to write full time. As Richard Gordon he is best known for the comic Doctor in the House novels, set in the fictitious teaching hospital St. Swithin's and adapted for film, television, radio and stage, and for The Alarming History of Medicine, published in 1993. He died on 11 August 2017.