Having spent his childhood in the backstreets of a northern steel town, Stephen Westaby went on to become one of the world’s preeminent heart surgeons. His drive for perfection in his profession took him to the world-renowned Harefield Hospital, the foremost heart surgery centre in Birmingham, Alabama, the newly-created Cardiothoracic Centre in Oxford, and then in 2019 in Wuhan he was the first Western doctor to learn about Covid before the virus was identified.
