­Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow, where he attended medical school and indelibly acquired what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the strong Scots accent of mind.”

In a varied career as doctor and writer, he has worked as a general practitioner, hospital doctor (in the Ameri­can Hospital of Paris as well as in the Australian outback), editor and translator, and since 2005 as a public health consultant in western Papua, the southern Philippines and other remote parts of south-east Asia.

His publications include four collections of poems, a history of modern medicine as told through literature, and a collection of essays on European intellectual history. Some of these works can be found in the Notebook section of this website. He writes for Quadrant, Times Literary Supplement, British Journal of General Practice, and has a regular column "Catchwords" on language, culture and ideas in PN Review. Home for the last fifteen years has been on the French side of the Rhine but within hailing distance of Germany.­­­

This website is intended as a resource for anyone interested in Scottish and European literature, in the ideas underpinning contemporary Europe, and in medicine as a profession and practice, social utility, and education of the senses.