Meet the Author
About David Macintosh
For fifty years I was an orthopaedic surgeon, and for most of them I was quietly preoccupied with the one thing surgery depends on but rarely names: trust. A patient lies down, loses consciousness, and hands their body to a stranger. What could possibly justify that? That question followed me from the operating theatre into a Master of Bioethics and then a PhD — Trust and Betrayal in the Physician–Patient Relationship — and it has never really let me go.
My training and my working life took me a long way from any single hospital. I began at the Royal Melbourne, flew with the Royal Flying Doctor Service out of Derby in the Kimberley, and operated in Lae in New Guinea. I trained in Scotland, England and New Zealand before returning home to Melbourne — the Alfred, Peter MacCallum, and years of private practice — and eventually moved north to become Director of Orthopaedics at Cairns Base Hospital. For five years I returned each year to Papua New Guinea to teach surgery and trauma to its medical graduates and nurses, work I cared about deeply.
But the operating was only ever half of it. From early on I was drawn to the harder, quieter questions medicine tends to hurry past — what honesty at the bedside really requires, what it means to be not just a competent doctor but a good one, and how much of healing happens in the space of trust between two people rather than under the lights of a theatre. I taught medical ethics for the better part of thirty years, at Monash University and at James Cook University, where I became Associate Professor of Ethics and Professional Development and chaired its domain of ethics and professional development. I wrote and lectured on trust, on clinical judgement, on Aristotle and the competent surgeon, and on the uncomfortable truth that we sometimes deceive the very people who depend on us.
Now I write.
Where Is My F**n Leg?! is a novel, told here in chapters, and around it I write essays and the occasional reflection on poetry. The stories and the essays wear different clothes, but underneath they share a single subject — the same one I carried through five decades of medicine: what we owe the people who trust us, how healing actually happens between two human beings, and what it costs when that trust is broken. Fifty years at the bedside taught me things no textbook did. This is where I try to set them down.
If any of it speaks to you, I'd be glad to have you read along — here on the site, and through my newsletter, where each new chapter and essay appears first.
A full account of my medical and academic career — qualifications, appointments, publications and lectures — is available in my curriculum vitae.
