WELCOME TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF THE LIVER

Members are invited to vote for their next President Elect.

The successfully nominated candidates are:

• Professor Rajiv Jalan
• Professor David Jones
• Dr Rebecca Jones

If you are a BASL member and have not received a voting link please contact judy@basl.org.uk . 

Deadline for voting 23:59hrs on Thursday 10th September 2020. 

It is with great sadness that we record the passing of Professor Neil McIntyre on 19th July, aged 86. Neil was born on the 1st of May 1934 in Ferndale in the Rhondda Valley in Wales, and was educated at Rhondda County Grammar School for Boys. In 1951 he started his pre-clinical medical studies at King’s College, London, also achieving a 1st class BSc degree in Physiology in 1955. His clinical studies were at King’s College Hospital Medical School and he graduated MB BS in 1958 with distinctions in Pathology and Applied Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Thus he already had academic aspirations at that time, and indeed was co-author of publications in Nature and the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1955 and 1956. His early postgraduate training from 1959 to 1960 was at King’s College Hospital and the Hammersmith Hospital. In 1960 he was called up and was posted as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force Medical Branch to what was then the State of Aden, where he spent three years.

On his return, he was appointed to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine as a Medical Research Council Junior Research Fellow, and Registrar in Medicine to Professor Sheila Sherlock on the Academic Unit. His research led to his MD thesis (“Oral glucose tolerance; the physiological importance of the intestine and liver”)(1967). Meanwhile in 1966 he was awarded a two year Medical Research Council Travelling fellow at Harvard Medical School, working in the Gastrointestinal Unit, at the Massachusetts General Hospital with Professor Kurt Isselbacher.

After this in 1968 he returned to the UK and was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine (Liver Unit) at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine, and was promoted through the years to Reader and then Professor. When Sheila Sherlock retired in October 1983, he was appointed to Chairman of the Department. With the joining of the Royal Free and University College Medical Schools he subsequently became Director of the Division of Hepatology at University College London Medical School and The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. He also served as Vice Dean and Clinical Sub-Dean until his retirement in 1999.

Neil enjoyed a long and productive academic career. Remarkably, as an undergraduate, he co-authored the two papers described above on the effects of denervation on the histochemical appearance of cholinesterase at the myoneural junction. Few could claim such a distinction. He and his team’s publications focussed on carbohydrate metabolism and insulin secretion, lipids, lipoproteins and cell membranes (particularly lecithin:cholesterol acyltransferase activity in liver disease), and the effect of lipoprotein changes on cell membranes composition and function. However he was the author of a myriad of clinical papers. His wide ranging interests in hepatology reflected the breadth and depth of his expertise, in a time when a narrow range of research topics was less required. Apart from the topics noted above, his publications ranged from haematological disorders in liver disease, portal hypertension, drug induced liver injury, alcoholic liver disease, genetic diseases, primary biliary cholangitis, computers in hospitals (in 1981), and computerised medical information (in 1974). A search of his seminal papers includes a classic description of haemolytic episodes in children and young people with Wilson's disease (New England Journal of Medicine, 1967).

He was the lead editor of the first edition of the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Hepatology in 1992, and co-editor of the second edition in 1999 with other renowned European hepatologists. This textbook presented a comprehensive account of clinical hepatology comprising more than 150 chapters by international experts in two volumes. Other books included 'Therapeutic Agents and the Liver', edited with Sheila Sherlock (1965); 'The Problem Orientated Medical Record: its Use in Hospital, General Practice, and Medical Education', edited with J.C. Petrie (1979); and
'Lipids and Lipoproteins in Clinical Practice' with David Harry in 1991.

Neil McIntyre had a particular lifelong interest in medical education and was instrumental in developing an up-to-date medical student curriculum at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. He was always a stickler for the practice of clinical medicine and emphasized Oslerian traditions of history taking, and examination. He fostered, with considerable enthusiasm, Problem Orientated Medical Records (POMR), and audit. Amongst his more notable papers in these areas is one in the British Medical Journal which he co-authored with Sir Karl Popper, one of Britain’s foremost philosophers and social commentators, entitled “The critical attitude in medicine: the need for a new ethics”.

Neil also contributed to many learned Societies, including as secretary to the Medical Research Society (1972-1977) and the nascent European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL)(1975-1977), as well as being a Council Member for Europe of the International Association for the Study of the Liver (IASL)(1978-1982). He was also a member of the Committee for the British Association for the Study of the Liver (1976-1978), as well as a member of Council of the British Society of Gastroenterology and of the Association for the Study of Medical Education. Between 1976 and 1978 he was also President of the Osler club of London. In 2006-2007 he was President of the History of Medicine Society of Wales. Neil was a member of Council and a member of the research committee of the Royal College of Physicians of London. He served as an associate editor of the Journal of Hepatology and on the editorial board of Gut

Neil was renowned for his eclectic interests and chose his subjects with considerable perspicacity. A keen medical historian from his student days, he spent much of his time in retirement working on his treatise “How British Women Became Doctors: The Story of the Royal Free Hospital and its Medical School” and on other historical topics. “I was concerned that the school’s remarkable past might be airbrushed from history and that the hospital might also fail to get the attention it deserved,” he said. In this book he described how a group of young female students formed the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. They had been blocked from qualifying as doctors through any of the British universities, so took matters into their own hands. The Royal Free, then based at Gray’s Inn Road, stepped up to train the 14 students, admitting the women for clinical studies. This initiative “laid the ‘foundation stone’” for the medical education, qualification and licensing of women in Britain and many other countries.

He wrote of his interest in medical statues: “My interest in medical statues began as a student at King’s in the late 1950s when I wrote a short biography of its founder Robert Bentley Todd for the King’s College Hospital Gazette.” This led (as described in the publication of his lecture at the RCP of London) to his novel ‘hobby’: Neil identified more than 300 statues worldwide, and many busts and other monuments to doctors.

However, clinical medicine, basic science, medical education and medical history were not his only enthusiasms. He was a born and bred Welshman who espoused this part of his being enthusiastically throughout his life. He enjoyed rugby, which he played as a student, and cricket, and continued to play golf for as long as he was able. We remember him practicing his putting across his spacious office in the Academic Unit. Through this and the clinical and academic work Neil encouraged the Royal Free “international family” to continue their strong ties as first engendered by Sheila Sherlock. He will be remembered with respect and affection by numerous colleagues nationally and internationally and by a generation of Royal Free graduates.

Neil married Wendy Anne Kelsey in 1966, the year that she qualified from the Royal Free School of Medicine, and she became a highly respected general practitioner and trainer. They had one son, and one daughter and three grandchildren. His daughter also studied medicine at the Royal Free, continuing its proud tradition of women students.

We send our heartfelt condolences to Wendy, and all his family

Geoff Dusheiko and James Dooley
August 2020