Obituary of Caroline Richmond
In 1987, medical journalist Caroline Richmond, who has died aged 82, was shocked by the barrage of protests following an article in the New Scientist which claimed that food additives were largely harmless. Curious to test what else people might think is harmful, and a fan of wearing bright colors, she wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for the British Medical Journal: “Fabric Dyes: Are They in the Consumer’s Interest?”
It was suggested that wearing brightly colored clothing could have a range of effects, including increasing the risk of cancer and masking serious psychiatric disorders by making people too cheerful. The article was allegedly published by the Dye Related Allergies Bureau (DRAB), a subsidiary of the Food Additives Research Team (FART), which Richmond assumed would alert readers to the joke.
However, the charity Action Against Allergy published the piece in earnest in its newsletter and readers contacted Richmond to share their experiences with mild clothing allergies.
It concerned Richmond and convinced her that Britain needed a body to challenge health misinformation – like the National Council Against Health Fraud that existed in the US. In 1988 she circulated a proposal, “Why Britain Needs an Anti-Quackery Organisation”, to like-minded colleagues, and on 1 November 1988 the inaugural meeting of the Campaign Against Health Fraud took place at the Old Bell pub in Fleet Street, London. . Other participants included cancer specialist Professor Michael Baum, hypoglycemia expert Professor Vincent Marks and presenter Nick Ross.
In its early days, the organization – which changed its name to HealthWatch (1990) and then HealthSense (2022) – campaigned against untested cancer “cures” but soon expanded its scope to scrutinize conventional medicine to take. Richmond served on the committee for a number of years.
Her skill as a medical journalist made her adept at demystifying evidence and putting it into layman’s terms. A complex character, whose favorite magazine was the skeptic, she was generous, idealistic and attracted to controversy. She could be tough. Ross said: “I wouldn’t want to get on Caroline’s bad side. If I was a quack pushing pills to the worried sick, she’d be in there like a bulldog.
In 1989, a friend, Patrick Collard, died and Richmond wrote his obituary. It took her career in a new direction and she became a prominent obituary of doctors and scientists for the BMJ, the Independent and the Guardian for decades. Richard Smith, editor of the BMJ from 1991 to 2004, described Richmond’s writing as “clear and to the point with colorful sentences”.
For example, when she had to describe physiologist William Keatinge encountering a bear waking from hibernation, she summed up the situation with a Shakespeare-inspired phrase: “Exit Keatinge, chased by a bear.” Describing the process, Richmond said, “It’s like portrait painting. Sometimes the writer really captures the subject, which is a wonderful feeling.”
Some of her favorite subjects included surgeon Norman Shumway, whom she later remembered as “the true humble hero of heart transplantation” and Lord Douglas Blackapplauding him “for exposing health inequities and working to eradicate them.”
In painting a big picture of a person’s life, Richmond was unwilling to gloss over shortcomings or avoid judgment. In 2003 she wrote a obituary for the BMJ from Scotia Pharmaceuticals founder David Horrobin. She had worked for him and could vouch for his charm and intelligence, but said his research ethics were questionable and that, as a promoter of evening primrose oil (the drug she said proved no disease), he “may well be the greatest snake might turn out to be. oil salesman of his age.”
The obituary prompted months of thunderous letters to the BMJ and a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission. Smith apologized as BMJ editor for offending Horrobin’s family, but defended the piecesaying, “A lot of what our readers want is what I call glorified obituaries, but we want serious pieces of journalism that tell stories and pass judgment on a character.”
She was born Caroline Smith in Leicester. Her father, Carlo, was Anglo-Indian and worked in the government, and her mother, Kathleen (née Meeson), was a secretary. She had an older brother, Clive. It was not an easy childhood: she did not get along well with her father and did not fit in at school. The family moved to Kensington, London, after the Second World War, and Caroline attended the Richmond County School for girls, where she was expelled, she said, because she was not punctual, never had the right uniform and made the other girls laugh . But she came across science books in the library and said, “Facts and science became my refuge.”
At the age of 16, Caroline got a job as a laboratory assistant at a teacher training college. She studied for A-levels at night school and then a zoology degree at Sir John Cass College in London (now part of London Metropolitan University). Her studies were interrupted by a nervous breakdown, but she still obtained her BSc and began a PhD in neuroscience at University College London. Some results from her experiments compared poorly to those of a colleague (whom she was sure was cheating) and she did not complete the PhD. Instead, she started as a freelancer for the New Scientist. She also worked for Horrobin for several years in his start-up publishing company in Lancaster.
In the late 1980s she became the British correspondent for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, contributing to a BBC program on the history of the NHS and a Granada World in Action program about rogue doctors who exploited people who thought they had allergies. She has also contributed to several books and co-wrote Insulin Murders (2007) with Marks.
In 1976, Caroline had married Peter Richmond, but it was not a happy relationship and they divorced two years later, although she kept her married surname. Through Guardian Soulmates, she met Jim Edgar in 2010, when she was 68, and they married in 2015. Besides work, she said her partnership with Jim was one of three things that gave her great happiness (the other being her cats Thisbe and Horace and her membership of the Chelsea Arts Club).
Richmond lived in poor health for many years. In 1992 she had surgery to remove the uterine lining and when she came to, she discovered that surgeon Ian Fergusson had removed her ovaries and uterus because he feared he had found a cancerous tumour. She was shocked, calls it “a castration”, and complained to the General Medical Council. The surgeon was cleared of wrongdoing, but it was a high-profile case and as a result the BMA tightened their guidelines to ensure patients gave informed consent to procedures.
In November last year, Richmond was made an honorary member of the Medical Journalists’ Association for her work with HealthSense. She was very ill with normal pressure hydrocephalus, but nevertheless continued to lobby on health and other issues she cared about. Unhappy that a rose in her garden was named ‘Mortimer Sackler’ (a major player in the Purdue Pharma scandal), she persuaded the RHS to drop the name and it became “Mary Delany”to her satisfaction.
Richmond is survived by Jim and her stepchildren Lisa and Ian.