In Memoriam: Roy Porter 31 December 1946-3 March 2002

Even from the relative distance of the end of this long year, the knowledge that the historian Roy Porter died on 3 March remains very hard to grasp. The indefatigable Roy Porter died in the middle of his life: to have to write those words seems a contradiction in terms. But die he did. Other obituary notices have concentrated on the whole of his career, and have done so in fine detail. This notice for the Bulletin allows different reflections.

The first—perhaps rather obvious—point is that most of us, both general readers and academic historians, have still to catch up with the bulk of Porter's output. This is not just because there will be several posthumous works, but because all the mythological aspects of Porter's working life were true—he really did write faster than we can read. The heart of that productivity is usually cited as an index of personal energy, which it obviously was. But equally important and very much at the heart of the man was a simpler motivation: as in the market economy of the eighteenth century that he loved and wrote about in a multitude of ways, once Porter had said he would, he did. He and the publisher talked; they signed; Porter delivered; he moved on. Being Porter, he could of course engage in this transaction with a number of publishers simultaneously. But the being on time was the same for all of them.

This private market economy, this universe, allowed Roy to be a teacher, a research supervisor, an editor of both essay collections and journals (History of Science, History of Psychiatry), a broadcaster, a reviewer, a critic—and a colleague. He was also one of the very best proofreaders that any of us will ever meet, with a library of often hilarious "errors" made by author or printer. It is also timely to suggest that some of the overpraising of parts of his output would have embarrassed Porter, not because he did not take pride or want to excel—he very much did, and in the strongest terms—but because he knew perfectly well that the time he had given himself for some of his productions was simply not enough. . . and that it showed. But he had kept his word, and there was always a next time—that was the Enlightenment ideal, the consumer ideal, the antidote to sterility and repetition. There was also a rank of hidden workers within the Porterian universe, from Xerox wizards to postal workers to couriers to secretaries. Porter was lucky in many ways but he was especially lucky in his research assistants, those tireless women—and they were almost always women—who knew every tunnel and corridor and twisting passage in every library and record office in the land. It may seem an exaggeration from the outside, but for those involved the scale of the whole operation when fully under way was genuinely Wagnerian. Not that Porter would have liked that analogy: he was definitely a Schubert man.

The outlines of the career itself testify both to independence of spirit and to rising to a challenge. A Cambridge history double first, a Ph.D. in the history of geology, an exit from Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1972 to Churchill College where he became dean (a likely story!), and then in 1979 an exit from Cambridge entirely. Upon arrival at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, Porter had to have some Big Ideas, and they came thick and fast: the history of the patient; the checkered history of the mountebank; the forgotten voice of the madman; the history of medicine from nothing less than antiquity to the present day; the insistence that the first two books that medical students read on their one-year B.Sc. were E. H. Carr's What is History? and Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis...