One morning a few weeks ago Stephen Foot, a warehouseman from Enfield, woke up in a London hospital to discover the unlikely harbinger of a coming medical revolution. This Ghost of Healthcare to Come took the form of a nephrologist at the end of his bed. “That was the last thing I was expecting,” he tells me. “Somebody from the renal department to come and say, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s something going on that has sparked an alert on your kidney.’”
Foot had entered hospital because of his foot. He had stepped out of the bathroom at home and trodden on something. “It was a trinket off a keyring which had a glass bottle of fairy dust in it. But because I’ve got bad