Will Nixon was born a hundred years ago and died, far too soon, when he was still only 62. Yet his influence lives on and the force of his radical mind can still be felt. It is therefore fitting that one of his former students, Geoffrey Chamberlain, should write this book. For Nixon was not just a forward-looking and brilliant doctor, he was a human being with rare gifts of sympathy and compassion; a reformer in areas where medicine still lagged painfully behind and a crusader whose campaigns were to change for the better the lives of thousands of women. His personality was so strong that he gives people who never met him the perception that they knew him well.

There is hardly a cause which affects the welfare of women in which he did not make his impassioned views felt. He was a scientist who spoke from the heart. His principal aim was to change the art of midwifery into the science of obstetrics. He was a humanist who understood that the mind, nature, and sexuality of each woman must be constantly related to her problems and symptoms. He was thus a great trailblazer in his advocacy of what we now call holistic medicine. He was a first-rate clinician and an early advocate of the doctrine that women should govern the destinies of their own bodies. He was one of the first to arrange for his students to have lessons in birth control.