Let Your Life Speak: April 2026

We were delighted to welcome Professor Michael Marks for this term’s Let Your Life Speak lecture. As a consultant in Infectious Diseases and a Professor of Medicine at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Michael has spent his career addressing how structural social inequalities affect global healthcare.

Addressing our Senior School students, Michael gave three case studies from his career, spanning treating scabies in the Solomon Islands, addressing access and uptake to healthcare in Ghana, and treating the Covid pandemic in a predominantly Jewish community in Stamford Hill, North London. The common thread among these case studies was the opportunity to address the underlying structural and social phenomena – rather than individual cases – in order to have a sustained impact.

Michael encouraged students to reflect on three key thoughts:

• Where you’re born does most of the work, and we are fortunate in the privilege we have been afforded. The rest of your life is what you do with that. What will motivate you going forward?
• Nothing important gets done by one clever person. Teams of people are involved in solving global problems. You need to learn to work with others!
• The most important people are usually invisible. As the School motto – ‘Sic vos non vobis’, ‘this we do, but not for ourselves’ encourages, we must go out into the world and find a way to translate your personal mission to help others.

We look forward to watching our Sidcotians going out into the world to put these thoughts into practice.