| History | [Biographical information edited from Dr. Diarmuid O’Driscoll’s own reflections on his career, which were first published in The Matrix, the newsletter of the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, RCPI.]
Dr. Diarmuid O’Driscoll did his district midwifery as a student in the old Coombe Hospital in Dublin in 1938. He secured a post as a House Surgeon in the Mater Hospital and was Casualty Officer on duty there the night of the German bombing of the North Strand. After completing his house job in the Mater, he decided to move to England working variously in Manchester, London, Surrey and as a ship’s surgeon in the Merchant Navy.
After seven years there, four of them during war-time, O’Driscoll returned to Ireland, moving to Galway where he took up a ‘temporary’ post in obstetrics, which lasted nine years. This post became the most sensitive medical post in the country because it was intimately involved with the Mother and Chid Scheme and Noel Brown intended to appoint the first Obstetrician / Gynaecologist in his new scheme there. Although an interview was held for the post no appointment was made, leading to Noel Brown's resignation in 1951. In his first year in Galway he had only one or two private patients. To keep himself occupied, he undertook the care of a case of massive pulmonary embolism, which occurred in an acquaintance of his. This eventually turned into a massive lung abscess. He treated this with penicillin inhalation rather like a modern inhaler for asthma. The patient recovered and evacuated the abscess spontaneously. He published this case in the Lancet. He also performed one of the first exchange transfusions in Ireland in 1950, and along with Prof Lavelle, published a paper in the Lancet in the mid- fifties describing the use of concentrated plasma in restoring the blood fibrinogen in the case of disseminated intra vascular coagulation complicating a missed abortion. Another incident he recalls was the loss of the Lufthansa plane off Galway Bay with a loss of overt 100 lives. As he was medical director of the Red Cross at the time, he had to attend the carnage.
After twenty years in Galway, O’Driscoll was asked to become the head of the maternity unit of Wexford Hospital, which was established in 1973 and where he would spend the next twenty years working and where he still lives today. An unusual detour during his time in Wexford were posts in Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad, which was run by PARC, a subsidiary of Aer Lingus, at that time part of the Irish Government who had major beef trade with Iraq. Iraq at the time had a relatively good relationship with the West and there were hundreds of Irish workers in the hospital during the time of the Iran-Iraq war right up to the first Gulf War.
|