Jamaica's Finance Minister, Edward Seaga, declared it a "miracle"; a little later, PM Michael Manley called him a dreamer. PM Eric Williams of Trinidad told him he didn't belong with them. A Canadian Medical Association journalist disparagingly also called him a dreamer and an optimist. PM Errol Barrow of Barbados backed him. Minister Ebanks of Cayman offered him the CMO position. The book deals with the challenges a poor region faces when it seeks self-sufficiency and to develop educational institutions of high standard, free of external control. It describes in fair detail the critical actions taken at a crucial time in UWI history, when it faced grave financial and social difficulties, while the author and many others in the medical and other Faculties grappled with the beast that threatened its existence as a regional body, with great potential to unite the Anglophone Caribbean, and give its scholars a place and a voice. The Medical Faculty, in trying to be self-sufficient on a shoe-string and stem the "brain drain" of half its annual output of doctors, faced the skepticism and near ridicule of some influential "well-wishers," and "off-shore medical entrepreneurs" who were luring the islands, one by one, into allowing their idyllic locations and independence to be exploited as bases for American medical education for profit. Given the bare minimum in resources, he-in collaboration with friends and associates, named in the book-conceived and set up a successful series of innovations in medical education, programs and policies to produce a wide range of specialists, family doctors and other health workers, and start a Division of Community Medicine. Ten years later, the skeptical journalist summarised his work as "high quality on a low budget." Today the UWI thrives on three campuses, produces enough physicians, generalists and specialists, for Caribbean needs and some for export even The output continues: from aides and assistants to nurse practitioners, administrators and educators, general and family physicians, specialist physicians including Public Health and Community Medicine, along with a range of technicians and basic scientists, through Masters and Doctorate programs, who now populate the medical services of the Commonwealth Caribbean. The book includes tables and photographs, and an Appendix with copies of original documents and published papers.