The death of Prof Neil Justin O'Doherty, MD, FRCPI, FRCP, came five years after his retirement as Associate Professor of Paediatrics in University College, Dublin, based at the Children's Hospital, Temple Street.
Neil was the only son in a family of six. From O'Connell School in North Richmond Street, Dublin, he won a scholarship to UCD, qualifying in medicine in 1952. From the Mater Hospital he went to work in hospital medicine in London, and in 1956 he made his choice of a career in paediatrics, a speciality which had developed rapidly in the post-war period and one destined to assume worldwide importance during the succeeding decades. His early training was obtained at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London and in Toronto.
In 1960, he went to work as a research fellow in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and became involved in the landmark Child Growth and Development Study under the direction of Dr Mary Ellen Avery. She would have liked him to remain there but he chose to return to London and, in 1962, to Guy's Hospital, where he stayed until moving as consultant to the West Middlesex Hospital in 1968. It was in Guy's that he first met Dr Mary Sheridan who, while working in community and school child health, had developed clinical systems for the early detection of various handicaps in children, including visual and hearing deficits. With her encouragement, Neil made a series of remarkable teaching films on the neurological examination of the new-born, on developmental examination, and on the examination of vision and hearing in young children.
In 1973, Neil joined the consultant staff at the Children's Hospital, Temple Street. Soon after his arrival there, he sent (jointly with the writer) a letter to the Editor of The Irish Times in which he warned of the potentially lethal dangers of non-accidental physical injury to children in their own homes. He based his opinion on his own and on international experience of child abuse. The response to this letter, from within and without the profession, was that this could not happen in Ireland. To some extent this was understandable since only just over 10 years had elapsed since Kempe had published his classic account of "the battered child syndrome" in the United States.
A further example of his prescience and of his awareness of the appalling damage inflicted on children by violence and abuse was to come one evening in the late 1970s when, in a lecture, he drew attention to the prevalence of sexual abuse of children, illustrating his talk with slides of some of the visual material which was commercially available and which was aimed at the paedophilic market. For this contribution he was reviled and some members of the audience walked out in disgust!
Neil wrote four books which gained him an international reputation in paediatrics. These were Atlas of the Newborn (1979), The Battered Child (1982), Neurological Examination of the Newborn (1986); and Inspecting the Newborn Baby's Eyes (1986). He used his unique collection of clinical photographs to illustrate these. A brilliant clinical teacher and diagnostician, he was always watching out for unusual clinical syndromes, as revealed by subtle clinical features, in infants and children with deviant development. A dysmorphologist before anyone thought of the name, he encouraged the geneticists to seek explanations for these often tragic cases in abnormalities of the human genome.
Neil read widely and among his favourite authors were Joyce, Dickens, Sterne, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. He lived for 19 years, from 1976, in a beautiful old riverside house in Chapelizod and he delighted in the fact that the house, Sunnybank, was mentioned in Finnegans Wake. He had a small wall-plaque designed for the side of the house on which were inscribed the relevant quotation and the page number in the first edition.
He spent his last four years in Kinvara House in Bray and was deeply appreciative of the care provided there by Denis and Mary Mangan and their staff. He said that although the unpredictable mood swings from depression to elation, produced by the cyclical illness which had plagued him for more than two decades, had made him their prisoner, yet he felt safe and protected in Kinvara. I think he liked the idea that, though now a recluse, he had also become a legend, with many affectionate anecdotes in circulation about him.
I had the privilege of being his close friend for more than 40 years. I loved and admired his brilliant mind, his startling lateral thinking, his literary erudition, and his wit. However, at the end, one had to watch in despair as the disease which has destroyed so many brilliant and creative people took its relentless toll on him.
Since his death on Februrary 19th, his sisters have received many letters of condolence from paediatricians here and abroad, from doctors in various medical disciplines who were inspired by his teaching, and from the parents of the many children who were helped by his skill and care. All of us must hope that his troubled spirit has at last found peace.
N.V.O'D.