To Cure and to Care

Doctor James Deeny, whose autobiography this book is, died on 3rd April 1994, aged 87. A distinguished graduate of the Belfast Medical School, he was born into general practice in Lurgan, County Armagh, where his father practised, and where he was to practise himself for thirteen years. To his practice he brought extraordinary gifts of intellect, observation and heart. In the conditions of those times there were enormous opportunities in general practice for the study of disease, and Doctor Deeny threw himself into investigation and prevention. This reviewer remembers the sensation caused by his discovery of a family with inborn methaemoglobinaemia, and his successful treatment of them by ascorbic acid. His careful clinical method led to him finding cases of pellagra in Lurgan, and to diagnosing ratbite fever in a recurrently febrile "mountainy man". He cured the fever, he does not say how, but it must have been by organic arsenicals. It was fortunate for his development as a physician, that in those necessitous, straitened, malnourished and infected times he had the care and study of great numbers of sick people with all sorts of disorders. His publications did much to bring their unfortunate lot to notice. In 1944 he became Chief Medical Adviser to the Department of Local Government and Public Health in Dublin. There followed eleven years of decisive administration of public health, and of reform and better provision of hospital care. These were years of great advances, and led to his appointment to the World Health Organisation. That took him the world over. This brief review cannot do justice to all Doctor Deeny's activity in Lurgan, Dublin, Geneva, Rome and the Asian and African world. Political opinions sometimes intrude in the book, sometimes painfully, but they are infrequent. We recommend this book to all doctors. We offer our sympathy to Doctor Deeny's family, and congratulate them on his life, so well lived.