Lyons, John Benignus (J. B.)

by Linde Lunney

Lyons, John Benignus (J. B.) (1922–2007), medical doctor, historian and author, was born 22 July 1922 in Highland Lodge, just outside the village of Kilkelly, Co. Mayo, third son of John Lyons and his wife May (née Higgins); there was also a sister. His father was dispensary medical officer in Kilkelly, and a pioneering amateur film-maker, whose short silent film, The seasons (1935), was restored and screened in Ireland and America in 2010 and 2011. It was acclaimed then as a sensitive and accomplished year-long chronicle of the vanished way of life of the area round Kilkelly.

The young John Benignus, often known as 'Jack', attended the local national school and then was sent to board at Castleknock College, Dublin, where he won a prize for essay-writing and also excelled at athletics. Though attracted by the study of literature, Jack, like his father and two siblings, decided to become a doctor; he qualified with the degrees of MB, B.Ch. and BAO from UCD in 1945, and took the degree of MD four years later. He was an intern in the Mater Misericordiae Hospital Dublin, and in the county hospital, Castlebar, in his native Mayo. However, despite his affection for his home county, the young doctor was not ready to settle down to a rural practice, and sought experience in hospitals in England. While based in a hospital in Croydon, north London, he attended postgraduate courses and lectures and developed an interest in neurology. In the same year that he graduated MD from the NUI, Lyons was made a member of the RCPI (1949). He then decided that he was going to spend a year to realise a youthful ambition: he wanted to emulate James Johnston Abraham (qv) as a ship's doctor travelling the world. In 1949 he was ship's surgeon on a P&O cargo liner sailing to Japan, visiting many of the notable ports of the Mediterranean, north Africa, India and the Far East, and then took another ship to South America. These voyages provided useful medical experience as well as many good stories. Travel remained a lifelong interest, but Lyons decided to develop his medical career in British hospitals.

After becoming registrar at Crumpsall hospital, Manchester, he worked in the department of neurology in the prestigious Manchester Royal Infirmary, and was senior registrar for a year in Salford Royal Hospital. In 1955 he came back to Ireland as consultant physician to St Michael's Hospital, Dún Laoghaire, and established a private practice which became in due course very successful. He became a fellow of the RCPI in 1959, and in 1965 was appointed consultant physician to Mercer's Hospital, Dublin. In the early 1970s he was awarded World Health Organisation fellowships that enabled him to visit leading US hospitals specialising in neurology. He published a number of medical papers on topics such as multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, and was president of the Irish Epilepsy Association; in 1974 he published A primer of neurology.

By 1974, however, J. B. Lyons was deeply involved in a parallel career. Alongside a busy clinical schedule and medical research, his early interest in literature led to the writing of three novels, set in England: A question of surgery (1960) (also published in Dutch and German translations), South Downs General Hospital (1961, 1963), and When doctors differ (1963). These were published under the pseudonym 'Michael Fitzwilliam', formed from the name of the hospital he worked in, and the street address of his consulting rooms. A fourth novel was written but never published. Instead, from the mid 1960s, medical history and biography became Lyons's preferred field, drawing on his medical knowledge, the research skills of a clinician, and enthusiasm for the interplay of literature and medicine. In 1966 he published his first biography, of an English cerebral surgeon, Sir Victor Horsley (1857–1916), and later wrote a number of scholarly articles on the history of neurology and on pioneers in neuroscience, including Robert Bentley Todd (qv). He was particularly interested in men like himself, who were involved in both medicine and literature, and wrote biographical works on the literary doctors Oliver Goldsmith (qv) and Oliver St John Gogarty (qv): The mystery of Oliver Goldsmith's medical degree (1978), and Oliver St John Gogarty: the man of many talents (1980). Lyons also became an expert on the work of James Joyce (qv), writing James Joyce and medicine (1973), and 'Thrust syphilis down to hell' and other rejoyceana: studies in the borderlands of literature (1988). Among his nine other books were The enigma of Tom Kettle (1983), William Henry Drummond: poet in patois (1994), and Surgeon-Major Parke's African journey (1994).

Lyons also wrote well-researched histories of St Michael's Hospital (1976) and Mercer's Hospital (1991), and An assembly of Irish surgeons: lives of presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (1984). Brief lives of Irish doctors (1978) was perhaps his best-known work, introducing the non-specialist reading public to some fifty figures from Ireland's distinguished medical past. Lyons also contributed articles and chapters on well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde (qv) and Charles S. Parnell (qv) to several edited volumes, and was a consultant in the early planning for the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography, as well as contributing eighteen articles on medical figures to the DIB. He was appointed librarian of the RCSI in 1973.

In 1975 Lyons's pre-eminence in the subject and his wide learning was acknowledged when he was appointed professor of the history of medicine in the RCSI. He continued in this role for twenty-five years, even after retiring from his medical posts in 1987. He was president, and for many years secretary, of the History of Medicine section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland. In 2003 the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences awarded him its lifetime contribution award. He visited China as part of an Irish medical delegation in 1976, and after retirement made several visits to Baghdad, as consulting neurologist in Ibn al Bitar Hospital. In 2002, to mark his eightieth birthday, the RCSI published a Festschrift, Borderlands: essays on literature and medicine in honour of J. B. Lyons. The essays, contributed by colleagues working in the history of medicine, represented some of the wide interests of a most productive life, and honoured a man of great literary abilities, culture and varied friendships.

In 1950, in Manchester, Lyons married Muriel Jones, a nurse from Wales; in the course of a happy marriage, they had two daughters and a son. John Benignus Lyons died in Dublin on 25 October 2007.