Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

John Raymond McClean

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 377; Issue: 9771 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(11)60423-6

1474-547X

Geoff Watts,

Primary Care and Health Outcomes

General practitioner and Irish civil rights activist. Born on Jan 16, 1932, in Coleraine, UK, he died on Jan 29, 2011, in Derry/Londonderry, UK, aged 78 years. You might say, borrowing the form but not the content of Karl von Clausewitz's celebrated aphorism, that Raymond McClean saw politics as the continuation of medicine by other means. The condition of the housing he encountered while doing home visits as a general practitioner (GP) in the Northern Irish city of Derry during the 1960s fired his sense of injustice. This was greatly magnified by the Bloody Sunday shootings of 1972, the culmination of a civil rights march in which McClean was himself taking part. Dismayed not only by the event but also by its aftermath he stood for election to the local council, and went on to become Derry's first Social Democratic and Labour Party mayor. The Derry in which McClean practised as a physician in the 1960s was very different from the city as it is today. “He was shocked by the housing conditions, with whole families living in single rooms”, says his GP colleague Aine Abbott. “At that time there were a lot of injustices.” Foremost among these was the discrimination against the town's Catholic and nationalist community. As Joe McEvoy, another of McClean's GP colleagues, recalls, “There's a story that he saw a lady in her home, found that she was suffering from TB and advised her to go to bed. She was sitting on a sofa. She said this is my bed. He found there were 26 people living in the one house.” It was the social conditions of Derry that prompted McClean to join the Northern Irish civil rights movement, and Sunday Jan 30, 1972, found him taking part in a march through the city. As he recounted in his book The Road to Bloody Sunday, the marchers began in something of a carnival mood, anticipating that they would probably be stopped and that there might be “minor rioting”. That this was going to be a march unlike any other began to dawn when he heard shooting. Because he was well known as a doctor, he was called to help. “I spent much of the time passing between the two houses where the dead and the dying were being treated, encouraging the young first-aid workers and others, and wondering at the outward calm they all maintained.” He also wrote of the confused welter of emotions he felt: a mix of fear, anger, and inadequacy. “When the ambulances were loaded and away we stood around the little square in small groups, smoking, subdued and talking in hushed tones. There was an air of unreality hanging over all of us.” The following day McClean received a phone call requesting him to attend the victims' post mortems as an observer on behalf of the Church. The notes he took of the bleak clinical details as each body was examined appear in an appendix to his book. His offer to give evidence to the Widgery Tribunal set up to report on the shootings was turned down. It was his first inkling that the report was to be wholly inadequate, as is now generally accepted in the wake of the 2010 Saville Inquiry report into Bloody Sunday. McClean studied medicine at Dublin's Trinity College, graduated in 1958, and then served for 3 years as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force. His wife, whom he met shortly after university, recalls that his aim was always to become a GP. “But Northern Ireland was over-doctored at that time”, she says. “We thought like many others that we might have to emigrate.” They didn't, but McClean did have to take a job in occupational health for a time. He then worked in several general practices in Derry, the last of which, set up in 1995, was Bayview Medical Centre. Located in the heart of the city, a block or so from the River Foyle, it was here that he was joined by McEvoy and Abbott. “Ray was an extremely gifted communicator and very interested in people”, says Abbott. “He inspired trust. He had good relationships with patients and with colleagues. A generous man who tended to underplay his own abilities, but an inspirational figure. He made a huge difference in a quiet way.” As McEvoy puts it, “If he thought something should be tackled, he tackled it.” McClean's enduring motive, whether it was the needs of individual patients or a concern with the civil rights of the entire community, was social justice. Having proved a popular councillor he was asked to consider becoming a Westminster MP. He declined, says his wife. Derry was where he wanted to be. “And he was a GP to the core.” In addition to his wife Sheila, he leaves a son and a daughter.