When people ask me where I’m from, I usually answer, “Glasgow, Scotland.” (I’m actually from Coatbridge, two miles east of the city’s border, but few people outside of Scotland have heard of the place, so Glasgow is close enough.) True to my roots, I’d like to highlight the work of a Glasgow-based academic called Watt – not James, but Graham.

Graham Watt is a Professor of General Practice at Glasgow University, and is also a founder of “General Practitioners at the Deep End,” which works with the GPs serving patients from the most deprived areas of the city. The project has revealed Glasgow to be a stark example of the Inverse Care Law (1), which suggests that the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with its need in the population it serves. One finding was spectacular, especially in a country with universal social medicine: the life expectancies of men and women in the lowest socioeconomic groups were 57 and 61 years – compared with 76 and 78 years for the richest (2).

Mark Hillen

Editor