Professor Barry E Kelly MD FRCSEd FRCR FFRRCSI 1961-2025

Barry Eoin Kelly was born on Wednesday 14 June 1961, around the same time that a custom-built Lincoln convertible was arriving at the White House for the use of President John F Kennedy. Kennedy would later be assassinated in that car on 22^nd November 1963. My first meeting with Barry was in February 1987 when he was a senior house officer in cardiac surgery in the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast. We’d drive our cars (not convertibles at that time, but Barry had plans….) into the car park at about 7am. His two tasks for the day were to strip the saphenous vein for grafting and to select the correct classical music for the cardiac surgeon – both jobs required meticulous preparation. My job as houseman was greeting the senior cardiac surgeon at 7.32am, (two minutes after he parked his Rolls Royce at the hospital entrance), taking and holding his leather briefcase and handing him my stethoscope for his use for the duration of the ward round. After that he’d head up to theatre where Barry would have the chest open and music ready to go. I’d go back to telling the unfortunate occasional patient they were being sent home after being found smoking in the toilets the previous day. Surgical post-op mortality was low and it was kept that way. We recognised later on that this was valuable ‘resilience and audit training’. Barry took those meticulous skills further with his encyclopaedic knowledge of anatomy and with a surgical fellowship under his belt, breezed the radiology fellowship exams and lit the fuse on a stellar career in radiology, being appointed consultant radiologist to the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1995. He lectured at Queens University Belfast as a reader, and at Ulster University as a professor.

He held every major radiological measure of esteem in this island and beyond; presidency of the Ulster Radiological Society, Dean of the Faculty of Radiologists at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland in Dublin (2012-2014), and was a major player in the European Society of Radiology. He examined at multiple levels in both UK and Irish radiology colleges and in the European Diploma in Radiology which he helped set up. For the Ulster Medical Society, as well as editor, he served on council for several years and regularly appeared on the annual lecture programme under various guises, giving the Desmond Whyte lecture¹ on at least two occasions when most lecturers had just about enough material in their career for one.

When I became editor of the journal in 2005, it was trundling along carefully like a monochrome hatchback out for a safe and regular Sunday run on a quiet country road at under 30mph, stopping in the corner shop for safe journalistic fare of case reports and papers. I traded that vehicle up for a large estate car in brightly coloured paint with a V8 engine and PubMed livery down the sides. I drove it on motorways at a full 70mph and started the process of stocking the ample boot space with editorials and reviews, stopping at literary service stations for the best review articles with commentaries that I could get. Barry watched me from the front passenger seat in 2009 as deputy editor, and assumed the editorship in 2010². On taking over, he stepped in, flicked the lights on to full beam, floored the accelerator, without stopping to fasten his seatbelt, and drove it round the nearest publishing racetrack in a manner characteristic of his early childhood love of new toys where he once launched his new bicycle downstairs on Christmas day, propelling it – unscathed - through a plate glass door at the bottom. He stopped regularly at the best journalistic delicatessens for top quality articles with variety and had a profusion of ideas - the estate car boot now brimming with reviews and articles covering a very wide range of specialties from eminent authors in their field. Every editorial added another section to the journal – sections familiar to readers today – Gamechangers³, Curiositas⁴, Bookcase⁴, pictorial reviews⁵, and of course, old fashioned paper submission not being fast enough, he added in the fuel injection of a fully electronic submission process⁶.

Barry Kelly, Editor, Ulster Medical Journal 2010-2014.

His meticulous skills shone through and with his literary flair the journal went from strength to strength. In my tenure I’d introduced full colour imaging and for a radiologist this was a great gift. The journal had the best quality and annotated figures in a PubMed journal anywhere. Sometimes if an author failed to contribute their promised piece approaching the publication deadline, he would just write the piece himself on the topic that same evening⁷. He was ahead of his time in so many areas, introducing anonymous peer review, continuing medical educational credits for reviewers⁸, QR codes for readers to scan³ and installed a new twin air horn to blow for the Journal in the form of Twitter⁷ and Facebook so that journal impact and awareness was maximised. Sometimes his prophetic announcements – such as his editorial on swine flu where he said ‘the question now being asked is whether the official response was overzealous’ – were like déjà vu in the recent Covid pandemic⁹. He covered a vast range of themes in his editorials from ancient civilisation¹⁰ right through musings on death¹¹ and cosmology¹². As he screeched into the pit stop with a handbrake turn flourish for the final time¹³ to hand over to his successor, it was fortunate he was doing so to a cardiologist, a specialty used to dealing with much wear and tear of internal pumps and electrics, as a much larger battery or even pacing assistance was now needed. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Ulster Medical Society after his editorial term in recognition of his work.

After giving the Royal Victoria Hospital Oration¹⁴ in 2019 which the journal published in full in 2021, ‘retirement’ freed up time for him to fit in his interests of philosophy, writing, and lecturing which until then, the day job had kept getting in the way. We would regularly correspond with interesting articles for each other. He was fascinated by the development of artificial intelligence in radiology having again picked up on it before others, during his editorship. When I sent him a note of the latest scanner’s ability to virtually unwrap and decode ancient scrolls, he was instantly off making more slides for another talk.

Last year he sent me a podcast on consciousness and succinctly summarised theories on it at the time into three categories – 1. It’s a mysterious unknowable fundamental force in the universe; 2. No it isn’t, its chemicals and electricity in your brain; 3. It’s panpsychism. Pure Barry, distilling down the arguments and evidence into simple language. My own feeling is that choice 1 is correct so I’m expecting his huge brain energy (physics dictates that the energy has to go somewhere), whatever project it’s working meticulously on now, freed of the constraints of his physical body, is creating wonderful images whilst travelling in another dimension somewhere in the cosmos, and likely travelling at the speed of light (or faster…).

Barry died peacefully at home on 22^nd June 2025. He is survived by his wife Susan and daughters Katie and Rosie.