Born of Russian parents who fled their home country and settled in Berlin before moving to the UK, Poteliakhoff has had two overlapping and, as he sees them, linked careers. The first, as a doctor, was prompted to a large extent by curiosity. “I was very curious about how brains and bodies behaved”, he recalls. “But in addition I wanted to do something positive, to contribute to society.” After his graduation in 1941 from Westminster Hospital Medical School in London he spent 4 years in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He aimed to become a consultant in general medicine, but following his years as a registrar he realised that too many juniors were chasing too few consultant jobs. In 1962, he left his hospital post at St Mary Abbots Hospital in London to become a GP in north Kensington, London, where he ministered to the needs of a community that included both the working and middle classes and a smattering of intellectuals. He retired from general practice in 1980, ending a medical career that may not have brought him a consultant post, but had nonetheless allowed him to exercise the curiosity that motivated him to join the profession. Research he'd begun in hospital medicine continued as a GP. “I was fascinated by the connection between psychosocial factors and the development of illness”, he says. The difficulty was to find a causal pathway. He began to look at blood cortisol as a possible factor, and joined the handful of people exploring a link between stress, chronic fatigue, and autoimmune disease, publishing a book on the topic, Real Health, in 1981 with a chemical pathologist.
