In 1999, as an undergraduate student in modern languages at the University of Oxford, I stumbled upon a documentary?about bioethics featuring an interview with?Jean Bernard, a renowned and by then elderly French haematologist, bioethicist and member of the Acad¨¦mie Fran?aise. ?

He described the remarkable changes in medicine during the 20th?century?¨C from the development of antibiotics to advancements in genetics?¨C and the ethical issues that accompanied them. I had not, until then, appreciated the moral complexity of medicine and I found it fascinating.

At Oxford it was not possible for non-medics to attend medical lectures, but I was allowed to sit in on the history of medicine lectures delivered to history students. I was struck by the dubious conduct of some doctors in the past, especially during the so called ¡°scramble for Africa¡± in the late 19th?century, when European countries occupied and colonised vast swathes of the continent. ?

So regular was my attendance that one day the director of the department approached me at the end of a lecture. I thought he was going to throw me out, but instead he suggested that I apply for a scholarship to study for a master¡¯s in medical history. All I needed to do, he said, was obtain a first-class degree.

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Somehow, I did. A few months later I found myself in Green College, studying medical history. The two high points of that year were meeting my future wife, Samantha?¨C then a medical student, now a surgeon?¨C and receiving a handwritten letter from Professor Bernard, stressing the importance of the study of medical history (in that order, of course).

A?year later, when studying for a master¡¯s in medical ethics at Imperial College London, I?met the genial Raanan Gillon?¨C a GP and a pioneer of medical ethics in the UK?¨C and read his little book,?Philosophical Medical Ethics. Buried in one of the chapters was a suggestion for a thesis on truth-telling in medicine. I asked him if he would supervise a PhD in the subject. He agreed.

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After the completion of my PhD in 2006, I took up a one-year lectureship in medical ethics at Keele University and then a permanent lectureship at St George¡¯s, University of London, where I taught medical students.

I loved teaching but soon grew disillusioned with other aspects of academic life. I would spend months writing journal articles that hardly anyone read. At first, this mattered little?because it embellished my CV, but with time it mattered more.?In 2007 or 2008, I remember telling myself that I would stop writing articles that no one read. The thrill of publishing in academic journals faded and I was much happier?writing a piece?for the BBC, where dozens of readers might engage in correspondence, than for a medical ethics journal where publication was followed by a deafening silence. ?

The next step in my descent into dissatisfaction was the increasingly troublesome thought that no one actually cared what I, a lowly academic, thought about this or that ethical issue. What possible difference could it make? It might, at best, generate a response from a colleague in a journal but the chances of anything I wrote making any practical difference were vanishingly small. After a few years, the whole academic endeavour seemed, to me, trivial and inconsequential. I longed for something more hands-on.

I also became bored of the never-ending cycle of setting exam questions and marking that is part and parcel of life as an academic working in a medical school.

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At the time I was a member of an excellent research ethics committee full of senior doctors and lawyers. I discovered that they thought about ethical issues as carefully and astutely as I did. This again made me question my value as an academic ethicist. The most impressive member of that committee was a barrister. When a solicitor friend mentioned in passing that he could see me as a barrister, that was it. ?

In the summer of 2009, I took?a gamble. I resigned from my lectureship at St George¡¯s and became a law student. I was called to the bar in 2011 and have practised ever since, specialising in medical law. ?

The academic life can be wonderful but it does not suit everybody. I write this piece in case it resonates with anyone out there who is worried about relinquishing a hard-to-get academic job for another career, or newly-minted PhDs who consider an academic post as the determinant of success. There are many alternatives and you may discover that your true talents lie elsewhere.?

Daniel Sokol is a medical ethicist, a barrister and the author of?Tough Choices: Stories from the Front Line of Medical Ethics?(2018).

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