Short answers, pulled from the story.
Roy Porter died on the 3rd of March 2002 from a heart attack while cycling. He had retired in September 2001 and moved to St Leonards-on-Sea, where he planned to learn the saxophone, cultivate an allotment, and travel.
Porter wrote or edited more than 100 books, a volume colleagues considered remarkable. The poet Michael Hofmann described him as "a one-man book factory."
Porter pioneered a patient-centered approach to the history of medicine, focusing on the experiences of sick people rather than on physicians and their achievements. He described himself not as a medical historian but as "a social historian and an 18th century man."
Porter spent more than twenty years at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, part of University College London, joining as a lecturer in 1979. He was appointed Professor of Social History there in 1993 and briefly served as the institute's director.
Porter received the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association in 1988 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He was also made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Porter's major works include The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997), A Social History of Madness (1987), Mind-Forg'd Manacles (1987), and Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000). He also co-edited the international journal History of Psychiatry from 1989 and edited History of Science for many years.