JOHN COWELL:JOHN COWELL, who has died, aged 96, made a crucial contribution to the fight against tuberculosis (TB). The challenge for him was its prevention.
John Cowell grew up in Co Sligo. In 1930 he came to Dublin and worked for six years, following which he was able to enter the Royal College of Surgeons. He graduated in 1943 and went to Grove Park Hospital in southeast London.
The patients there were soldiers, who had contracted tuberculosis in the Far East and were transferred home in the unhealthy manner of weeks on board troop ships. The hospital was already badly damaged and, when Hitler's V-1 and V-2 flying bombs began, more of the hospital was destroyed.
In 1946, Dr Cowell returned to Dublin and worked in various medical posts concerned with tuberculosis.
He had been critical of the tuberculosis service in England during the war, but he considered that there was sheer neglect of the tuberculosis service in Ireland.
In 1950 he became Medical Director of the National BCG Committee (BCG standing for Bacille Calmette Guérin; the C and G for the two doctors, Albert Calmette, a French bacteriologist, and his assistant and later colleague, Camille Guérin, a veterinarian, at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, who had discovered the vaccine to prevent tuberculosis).
The BCG committee report for 1950 recorded that 18,693 vaccinations had been achieved by four full-time vaccinators and one part-time. By the end of 1962 over one and a half million tests and nearly 700,000 BCG vaccinations had been achieved.
John Cowell was always a stickler for perfection. On one occasion he noticed that the medicine for the injections was thinner than it should have been.
The vaccine was imported from Sweden by air in ice boxes because heat and light caused deterioration. He took on the personal task each Saturday evening of collecting the vaccine from Dublin airport and refrigerating it as soon as possible.
As early as 1960 the annual report warned that, although tuberculosis as a killing disease was then under comparatively greater control, the annual rates of those contracting the disease had not at all declined with the same rapidity as had the death rates.
Forty years later Cowell remarked that the eradication of TB still eluded us and that TB was not a thing of the past.
By 1963 he moved on from the prevention of tuberculosis, which was increasingly being carried out by local authorities. He became then the secretary of the Royal Irish Academy and subsequently deputy secretary of the Irish Medical Association.
Despite his valuable work as a medical doctor, John Cowell had always wished to be an author. On retirement in 1977 he made it his priority.
In 1978 his first novel, The Begrudgers, was published.
The Irish society depicted in it shocked some at the time; it would not raise an eyebrow today.
The publisher Michael O'Brien then asked him to compile Where They Lived in Dublin, a publication which includes intriguing and unexpected Dubliners. Years later, Cowell reworked it for publication in paperback by O'Brien as Dublin's Famous People.
No Profit but the Name was his biography of the 6th Earl and Countess of Longford, otherwise Edward and Christine, who made major financial sacrifices to keep the Gate Theatre going in the 30s, 40s and 50s. John Cowell acted part-time at the Gate as a medical student (his medical books with him to study behind the stage).
Land of Yeats' Desire was John Cowell's loving book of Sligo, where he grew up. In 2005, he published his sixth book, A Noontide Blazing, a biography of Dr Brigid Lyons Thornton, who was imprisoned for her part in the 1916 Rising and later suffered tuberculosis.
John Cowell never married. His mother and her sister had raised him and his three sisters following the death of their father at a young age. It was his mother who pressed him to become a medical student and financed him. He looked after his mother and aunt in their declining years.
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Dr John Cowell: born March 13th, 1912; died July 24th, 2008.