[3] Francis spent time working in India and Africa, made several trips to the Arctic, and is said to have crossed Eurasia and Australasia by motorcycle.
[4] Francis was working at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh when he decided to undertake a 15-month position as the resident doctor with the British Antarctic Survey.
[5] He arrived at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica via the RRS Ernest Shackleton, a supply ship, on Christmas Eve, 2002, after a two-month voyage.
[7][8] His Adventures in Human Being (2015) won the Saltire Society Literary Award for non-fiction and was a British Medical Association (BMA) book of the year.
[13] In addition to book reviews, his contributions have occasionally consisted of prose ruminations on medical topics such as stethoscopes and the human brain, an approach that led to his being commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to produce a collection of essays in this style.