Sir Christopher Charles Booth (22 June 1924 – 13 July 2012) was an English clinician and medical historian, characterised as "one of the great characters of British medicine".
His father Lionel Booth is credited as the inventor of the telephoto lens.
A Navy doctor encouraged him to study medicine, so he enrolled at the Bute Medical School of the University of St. Andrews on demobilisation and graduated in 1951, serving as a houseman in Dundee before moving to the postgraduate medical school at Hammersmith hospital in London.
[2] Booth defended, Chris Pallis, a neurologist working under him at Hammersmith Hospital, when he was attacked for his left-wing views.
[3] He was also an outspoken, on one occasion noting that taking the doctors' pay demand to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would be not a red rag to a bull, as a colleague suggested, but "a red rag to an old cow".