John Forrester writes in The Independent:
Roy Porter, one of our finest historians, was born 31 December 1946. 
In the three different areas which became his undisputed territory of 
expertise - general eighteenth-century social and intellectual 
history, the history of medicine and the history of psychiatry - 
Porter's work will be indispensable. And on top of that there is his 
work in the history of geology and his love-child, the history of 
London, a book which teems with stories, hidden connections between 
names, places, social movements, urban pleasures and disasters. His 
work in the history of medicine on sex, on the body, on low life and 
professional life was all profitably channeled into this history of 
his home town. This was a very personal book; as a long-standing 
intimate of his reflected, he was "always a Londoner: you could 
imagine him selling his learned articles from a barrow in the East 
End."
The son of a jeweller, he was raised in Camplin St., New Cross Gate, 
London S.E.14, "a stable if shabby working-class community completely 
undiscovered by sociologists", as he described it, until 1959, when 
they moved to "pebble-dash Norwood with an indoor toilet". The 
self-described cuckoo in the family nest, his implausible talent for 
passing exams found him at a local grammar school, Wilson's in 
Camberwell, where his wonderful English teacher, David Rees, urged 
him to Christ's College, Cambridge. Betraying his mentor by reading 
history as the last of Jack Plumb's cohort of remarkable young 
historians - along with the slightly older Quentin Skinner, Simon 
Schama, John Brewer - he graduated with a double First in 1968. Roy 
was then inspired by Bob Young, a larger-than-life Texan Marxist 
historian of the brain sciences and Darwinism who moulded an entire 
generation of Cambridge historians of science, into doctoral research 
on eighteenth century geology, on which he received great help from 
Martin Rudwick, completing his thesis in 1974. This was the time of 
my first meeting with him, when in 1969, as an undergraduate 
attending my first Departmental seminar in Cambridge, I heard him 
give a paper on eighteenth century geology, providing me with a model 
of how it was done. Taking on the task of Director of Studies in 
History at Churchill College in 1972, he devoted himself to teaching 
twenty or twenty-five supervisions a week over the next few years, 
and was appointed to the unlikely position of Dean in 1977.
Though he published prodigious numbers of papers, there was as yet no 
hint of the imminent avalanche of books; he took the conventional 
three years to convert his thesis into a scholarly monograph, The 
Making of Geology. In 1979, taking stock of the time he devoted to 
students, to committees, and to being the one-person bridge between 
the Cambridge Faculty of History and the Department of History and 
Philosophy of Science, he decided to seek a post that gave him more 
time - and more facilities - to engage in research. He moved to the 
Wellcome Institute for History of Medicine on London's Euston Road, 
linked to University College, where he was first Senior Lecturer and 
then, from 1993, Professor of Social History of Medicine, till his 
early retirement in September 2001.
Porter's publications then came fast and furious: one edited volume 
on the earth sciences appeared in 1979, another on eighteenth-century 
science in 1980, two more (including one on the Enlightenment in 
national context with Mikulás Teich, an emigré Czech scholar who had 
a great influence on Roy and with whom he edited a series of seminal 
comparative studies of eighteeenth-century Europe), in 1981 and to 
round off the year a Dictionary of the History of Science. In 1982, 
Allen Lane published his English Society in the Eighteenth Century; 
four edited volumes appeared in 1985. In the early 1980s, he had 
initiated, with Bill Bynum, the research seminar in the history of 
psychiatry which was to breed a whole new generation of researchers - 
the volumes Bynum and Porter published under the title The Anatomy of 
Madness opened a new era, the post-anti-psychiatry era, in the 
historiography of psychiatry. 1987 saw the pace quicken: six edited 
volumes and four entirely from his own pen, including the fruit of 
his personal research in history of psychiatry - Mind forg'd 
manacles: a history of madness from the Restoration to the Regency 
and A social history of madness: stories of the insane.
Porter was making good on the new historical aims: writing history 
from the patient's point of view, and demonstrating how the 
Foucaultian history of the Great Confinement and the exclusion of 
madness from the Age of Reason certainly did not give a true picture 
of English madness. To the study of madness he brought a very 
different temperament than the sombre facelessness of the great 
French philosopher: he was, like the English eighteenth-century which 
he so evocatively described, genial and gracious, lovable and 
generous; already a benevolent patron to many, he was revealed as an 
unfashionably unassuming, though prodigiously learned, man of 
letters. No melancholic, his publishing record might lead some to 
entertain the only possible explanation of such immoderate 
prodigality: namely fits of mania.
Never tied down to one area of the past, Porter's next book was a 
return to the author he was obliged to read in his first week as an 
undergraduate: Edward Gibbon: Making History (1988). Another five 
edited volumes appeared that year; in the next year there were his 
Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660-1850 and (co-written with 
his third wife Dorothy Porter) Patient's Progress: Doctors and 
Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. If anything his pace 
quickened again: a slim volume on the Enlightenment in 1990 
foreshadowed his major study of 2000, Enlightenment: Britain and the 
Creation of the Modern World. Edited volumes in the history of 
medicine - on the senses, on literature and medicine, the definitive 
reference work (edited with Bill Bynum) on the entire history of 
medicine - preceded another look back at his own past: London: A 
Social History (1994).
By 1994, he was researching the book that no one else dared to write 
- and that no one will write for at least another generation, if not 
century: a general history of medicine, to replace Garrison's 
standard history published in 1917. The greatest benefit to mankind: 
a medical history of mankind from antiquity to the present, 800 pages 
of limpid, unassuming, lively and superbly well-informed prose, was 
published in 1997. While preparing this magnum opus, the flow of 
edited volumes continued unabated: on medical journals, waters and 
spas, Foucault's legacy, the historiography of psychiatry, drugs, 
sexual science, clinical psychiatry, the industrial revolution, the 
age of anxiety, the self and many more - not to mention the bulky 
works of reference on eighteenth-century history prepared with Jeremy 
Black. The flow was unabated into the new century, when Roy, 
unpredictable as always, decided to take early retirement and moved 
to the unlikely town of Hastings on the Sussex coast with his partner 
Natsu Hattori, to spend more time travelling, to learn the saxophone 
and to cultivate his allotment.
All who knew Roy spoke immediately of his unstinting generosity. 
Everyone remembered the first time they met him because something 
came of it, often their start in academic life: an invitation to 
contribute to a new volume he was editing; a request to supervise 
students that even he was too overwhelmed with commitments to take 
on; a stream of references that could form the backbone for a new 
research project. Roy moved fast, through the archive, through the 
social and academic world, through the plays and books which he 
reviewed at a pace that made even the other prodigious reviewers of 
our times, such as Anthony Burgess, seem sedate. Roy reviewed for all 
the Sundays, all the dailies, all the weeklies - New Society was a 
launch-pad in the 1970s - he always said yes to the editor in need of 
quick copy, who adored him for his nonchalantly impeccable 
deadline-meeting. He was for many years Editor of two major academic 
journals, History of Science and, with its co-founder German Berrios, 
History of Psychiatry. Always in demand as an External Examiner or 
advisor to University Appointments Committees, he would treat these 
serious occasions with the same steady detachment and unfussy good 
judgement he devoted to less solemn tasks: after a long day of such 
meetings, when others were prostrate with the exhaustion of having 
given, on Roy's advice, a coveted job for life to a young scholar, 
Roy would hop on his bike, off to the station to meet an equally 
crucial deadline talking to a local history society about quackery or 
to a sixth form in Shropshire about coffee houses as places of 
learning in the eighteenth century. He returned every year to his old 
school to give a talk.
        How did he do it? Beyond his undoubted capacity for quick 
reading, accurate retention of information and extreme rapidity for 
accurate assessment, the easy answer is to point to the very few 
hours of sleep he needed; and it was true - for some years, when I 
needed to contact him, I knew I could reach him in his office at the 
Wellcome between 6 and 7 in the morning where he was answering his 
prodigious post-bag before the busy day began. Just as remarkable as 
his literary productivity was his capacity for good living. In his 
Cambridge days, the Clare Street house where he lived with his then 
wife, Sue Limb, was famous for its superbly raucous and unbuttoned 
dinner parties - Roy did the cooking; even then, the guests knew 
that, once they'd left and Roy had done the washing up, he would sit 
down to write something. He was always busy but always had time for 
the main pleasures in life - for years we played chess by 
correspondence, sometimes having three games on the go. He did the 
same with many others. His conversation was always full of strange 
stories, humorous and uncanny, often of bizarre events that happened 
to him - such as the Chaplinesque consequences of the night life of 
London taking him for a fellow tramp.
And his standing as an historian? Comparisons are odious but 
inevitable. Was he the A.J.P. Taylor of his generation, effortlessly 
bridging the popular and the academic? Perhaps he is more akin to 
Peter Gay, upon whose remarkable work on the Enlightenment Roy 
respectfully built, and whose span is equivalent to Roy's. One 
feature of Roy's career is unique: he was the populist and good 
liver, the don in jeans and untreated leather boots, famous gold 
chain nestling on his hairy chest, arriving for parties with a 
bikelamp in one hand and a bottle of champagne (always he brought 
champagne) in the other, published and broadcasting everywhere, yet 
he was never outside the Establishment, in which he had absolutely no 
interest, never embattled and liminal as Taylor was, never withdrawn 
from the thankless tasks of keeping the profession going, never 
remote from the needs of younger and more workaday historians. Roy 
Porter's network of professional contacts comprised the whole field 
of history of medicine and history of science. Without him at the 
centre, there may no longer be a web. In seminars, learned journals, 
conference publications, reference books - in other words, in the 
internal academic world with no publicity, no money, no thanks but 
the gratitude of his colleagues - Roy Porter was the indefatigable 
centre of all things. Yet at the same time, his voice was always on 
the radio (an original presenter of Radio 3's Nightwaves), his easy 
style sprang out of every newspaper one opened. Being known by 
everyone but lacking all interest in fame, being at the centre of 
professional activities but lacking all interest in power or anything 
remotely akin to it - Roy Porter was generous and self-effacing. So 
generous that there was a curiously impersonal element to him: he 
never expected any return for the many gifts he showered on so many 
people, so the true nature of his connection with his friends and 
colleagues remained a mystery. The only time he asked me to do 
something that counted as a favour was to help him move his gardening 
tools from his allotment in Cambridge, when he was decamping to 
London in 1979.
        In his last major work, Enlightenment, he wrote: "The pen may 
not have been mightier than the sword, yet Enlightenment words did 
prove dangerous weapons. Those making quills their arrows were not 
the grovelling mouthpieces of absolutist rulers, but freebooters, 
those intellectual bandits who have ensured the intellectual anarchy 
of 'free societies' ever since." A freebooter and intellectual 
bandit, savourer and embodiment of intellectual anarchy, a fun-lover, 
such also was Roy Porter, yet a man of extraordinary generosity, an 
implausibly good citizen, who will be sorely missed. He leaves his 
partner Natsu Hattori, and his mother.