Geoffrey Dean is a recognised world authority on the epidemiology of multiple sclerosis (MS). He is still, at the age of 85, actively engaged in research into MS in various countries. In this readable and well illustrated autobiography, he describes how he witnessed Nazi violence in Germany before the second world war, exposed brutality against prisoners in apartheid South Africa, and began valuable epidemiological research in Ireland.
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Geoffrey Dean
Liverpool University Press, £15, pp 273 ISBN 0 85323 767 0
Rating: ★★★★
Geoffrey Dean had an inquiring mind from the beginning. When he was a student at Liverpool University before the second world war, he wrote to the richest man he could think of, Nelson Rockefeller, and asked him for money to go to Germany to see for himself what was going on there. To the author's surprise, Rockefeller sent him a cheque for $500. Dean describes how he saw a group of Nazi stormtroopers kicking and jeering at two elderly Jewish men who were being forced to wash a pavement. No one paid any attention to Dean's protests.
After the war, in which he served in the Royal Air Force, he emigrated to South Africa and set up as a consultant physician in Port Elizabeth. He noticed how rarely he saw a case of multiple sclerosis in white English-speaking South African born patients. It was 11 times as common among European immigrants. He felt that the disease was clearly caused by something the Europeans picked up before coming to South Africa.
He also started important work on porphyria. It was while looking for cases of this disease in the hospital records that he found the notes of four prisoners who had suffered fatal injuries inflicted by prison staff or the police. Dean drew this inhuman behaviour to the attention of the editor of the South African Medical Journal, and as a result was arrested. He was told that it was a criminal offence to make any comment against the prison service, for which the penalty was three years in prison. In the end the charge was dropped.
In 1968 he was appointed director of the newly created Medical Research Board in Ireland, which enabled him to initiate valuable epidemiological research in the republic. In one of his first studies he found, surprisingly, that 8% of deaths in the west of Ireland were neither registered nor medically certified. A leading politician said to him, “What a pity you didn't tell me—I could have added them to my votes.”
Dean's international adventures, and the descriptions of dramatic illnesses, including his own cardiac operation, will fascinate medical readers.