Dr Geoffrey Dean revolutionised the use of penicillin, campaigned against Apartheid torture and had a colourful private life. Now, he's fighting cancer
Vitae summa brevis. Life is short - and growing shorter for Geoffrey Dean, retired director of the former Irish Medico-Social Research board and a world-renowned epidemiologist. He is currently spending 10 weeks away from his home in Donnybrook, Dublin, to receive treatment for prostate cancer at the Sloan-Kettering medical centre in New York.
He is angry that the VHI has refused to pay for his treatment in the US. The health insurer argues that he could have radiation treatment in Dublin, but he counters that such treatment could cause collateral damage to his bladder and other organs.
Sloan-Kettering's innovative radiation treatment avoids such damage, and while Dean accepts that the VHI shouldn't have to cover the whole bill, he thinks it could at least make a contribution.
Dean is determined to stay alive well past his current 84th year. How can he die when he has yet to complete his ground-breaking research into multiple sclerosis in Malta? MS is rare in Malta and there appears to be a protective genetic element. Dean has also done ground-breaking research into porphyria - known as "the madness of King George" despite the fact that Dean proved that the British royal family never suffered from porphyria at all, a point lost on film-makers.
He has linked lung cancer with environmental smoke, tracked Dublin's heroin epidemic and he dragged the Republic into the 20th century as far as keeping proper epidemiological data was concerned.
When he arrived in the Republic in 1968, death certificates were patchy ("heart stopped" was a typical explanation) and sometimes non-existent. Dean once asked a widow about her husband's details. When he asked "sex?", she replied, "fine until a week before he died".
A warm conversationalist, Dean offers me chocolates as he describes his work, as we sit in his small study, lined with books and files. Dean's miniature Yorkshire terrier, Tallulah, is on his lap. Like a reminder of mortality, a devil's head rests by a painting of St Thomas More - a juxtaposition appropriate for a man whose life has been coloured by his romantic entanglements.
"During my life I have learned a great deal from women friends with whom I had fallen in love, but they have also caused me the greatest problems!" Dean writes in his newly published autobiography, The Turnstone: A Doctor's Story.
Dean's account of his research is interspersed with memories of a personal life worthy of a popular romance novel. It's a clever way to get people to read a dry topic such as epidemiology - recording incidence of death and disease in the community and relating it to lifestyle and environmental factors - which he describes as the unglamorous "notebook and shoe leather" area of medicine.
And so, while we read about Dean's medical research, we also learn that his romantic life reached a crisis point in 1960. Then, as a dashingly handsome 42-year-old doctor in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Dean found himself torn between his loyal wife and children and his roving European mistress, Maria, a glamorous, gregarious 23-year-old Yugoslavian who had married an Austrian baron. Maria wasn't giving up and followed her lover to South Africa. Next June, Maria and Geoffrey will have been married 40 years.
Maria breezes into her husband's study with coffee on a tray, and when I ask her about her own fascinating past, she turns to Dean and says: "That's not in the book is it?" Dean replies that it is not. Actually, it is. The pair seem to have an intriguing, intense relationship.
However, Dean's English mother was never impressed by her son's adventures, telling him: "If only you had remained a good Catholic and not been so questioning and adventurous and stayed quietly at home in England, you would have had a much easier and more contented life." No doubt she was right, Dean admits, "but life would have been much more dull".
Dean is one of those restless, searching people, with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, for whom serendipity and luck seem to have a master plan, although he was well into adulthood before he got a taste of success.
Born in England, his childhood was "pretty awful", spent in an abusive British boarding school. One of his worst memories is of being punished for feeling sexual arousal. "To say that the sexual is a mortal sin and you will go to hell forever is a dreadful thing to say to a young boy," he says.
After medical school, he was conscripted as a flying medical officer into the RAF. His role was to convince young pilots to fly, when they knew their chances of completing a "tour" of 30 operations was small. The few who came out alive had to return six months later for a second "tour" of 20 "ops", which hardly anyone survived. Dean had to scrape burnt and shattered bodies from returning planes and administered morphine to thousands of dying men, for whom no other medical treatment was available. At "the end of his tether", Dean himself nearly died of staphylococcal septicaemia, but was saved by doses of penicillin, which in those days was injected in a thick, black brew in a way that caused great pain. One of the first sign's of Dean's brilliance and pragmatism was that he suggested that penicillin injections be infused with local anaesthetic, an idea that soon became common practice.
During the war, Dean fell in love with his first wife, Nonie. They had to live apart and Nonie was so badly nourished that the couple lost their first child. When the war ended, there was no work for doctors in England, and so Dean left Nonie behind to try his luck in South Africa.
Arriving in Cape Town, he decided to climb Table Mountain and, to his amazement, met Jan Smuts, the then prime minister, who was on his way down. The pair struck up an immediate friendship - something for which Dean has a gift.
Dean could not find work as a doctor and was so poor that when Nonie eventually joined him in South Africa, with their year-old son, John, the couple had to live in vermin-infested dwellings and thatched huts. So, to protect his health, they left John with the nuns in Port Elizabeth - a major mistake, Dean realised in retrospect. "A young child should never be left like that," he says now.
Dean's luck kicked in when he met, by chance, the governor of the Fiji Islands who immediately asked him to be his personal physician, which entailed travelling around the world by sea and air. Paid 50 guineas a day for his trouble, Dean spent six months travelling at the governor's expense, while Nonie remained in South Africa.
When he returned to his wife, Dean discovered that his reputation was greatly enhanced in South Africa - all thanks to the patronage of the governor of the Fiji islands.
The couple's fortunes soared, they found a home on a stunning sea-side estate, Lauries Bay, and they had three more children, although Dean spent many months abroad travelling on research projects.
Life once again became bleak when their four-year-old daughter drowned in their swimming pool. On discovering her body, Dean tried to drown himself by walking into the sea, but was pulled back by a friend. Years later, he had an even closer call with drowning. His last thoughts weren't of his grieving widow and children, but that he wouldn't be able to complete his research into porphyria.
Self-absorbed and obsessed with his work, Dean was as passionate about medicine as he was about women. By 1961, Nonie had had enough and the couple divorced, although Dean insists that he loved Nonie until she died.
In 1962, Dean married Maria, then became involved in political controversy in South Africa. He was arrested and put on trial after he complained, in writing, to the authorities about medical doctors who turned a blind eye to torture and cruelty in the prisons under Apartheid.
With some deft political manoeuvring, Dean was acquitted, and remains proud that his passionate stance resulted in a decline in the number of unexplained prison deaths.
IN 1967, Dean - through the international medical network of which he was now a part - was invited to become director of Ireland's new Medico-Social Research Board. The invitation to leave South Africa was convenient, because in 1967 Dean found himself falling in love with Eithne Davern, a "beautiful and intelligent" woman who lived in a cottage at Lauries Bay. He decided that putting some distance between himself and temptation would be wise.
In the Republic, Dean worked with five health ministers. Charles Haughey, in his opinion, wasn't concerned about health issues, while Erskine Childers was a visionary Minister for Health. Dean blamed himself for committing his "major failure in Ireland" when, after his retirement in 1985, the Medico-Social Research Board was dissolved and amalgamated with the Medical Research Council.
But, 17 years later, Dean still has the passion, is still publishing medical papers and is determined to win his latest battle, this time with prostate cancer. Asked for his epitaph, should it be required, Dean offers: "Je ne regrette rien".
•The Turnstone: A Doctor's Story by Geoffrey Dean is published by Liverpool University Press