At the age of 42, James Hanlon went blind and eventually deaf. But far from accepting his career was over, he went on to help ease the pain of polio victims
WHAT MAKES some people carry on in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds? It’s a question frequently asked but seldom answered, at least with any degree of certainty.
The story of Dr James Hanlon, Dublin’s blind and deaf physician, is no ordinary tale of triumph over adversity.
His resolution not to be undone by the tragic events of his life and to remain true to his vocation baffled as many as it inspired.
And yet his story is not widely known to this generation.
When he died in 1961, at the age of just 53, his passing drew tributes and condolences from across the world.
Pope John XXIII ordered that news of his death be announced on Vatican radio.
An Irish Timesobituary, from the time, described him as a doctor who "overcame blindness and impaired hearing to lead a brilliant medical career".
Hanlon had been one of the more prominent ear, nose and throat surgeons in the capital in the 1940s.
As a consultant surgeon, he had completed a number of postgraduate studies abroad, most notably in pre-war Vienna, where he was schooled in the latest tonsillectomy techniques which he went on to pioneer in Ireland.
As well as working in the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital and St Lawrences (later known as the Richmond), he and two colleagues established a private hospital in Dublin’s Leeson Street.
As a 42-year-old surgeon, at the height of his professional powers, his life took a strange and tragic turn.
He developed a freak ocular infection when a patient coughed sputum into his left eye during a routine medical examination.
After an unsuccessful operation in London, infection began to impair his vision, and before long spread to the other eye, through a process known as sympathetic ophthalmia. Within the space of a few months, Hanlon went blind. His troubles, however, were not to end there. His doctors had attempted to control the infection by using relatively large doses, by today’s standards, of streptomycin – a new antibiotic at the time – which had severe side effects on his hearing, eventually making him deaf as well as blind.
Veronica Freeman, the eldest of his four children, who was 10 at the time, recalls the shock of seeing her father returning from London after the operation with his sight all but gone and his hearing on a similar trajectory.
Watching from an upstairs window, she recounts seeing her father being shepherded into the house on his brother’s arm; radically altered from the energetic, young physician who had left for London just weeks previous.
“He seemed suddenly older, not like my dad at all.”
She remembers he became depressed for a time, secretly admitting to his wife’s sister that he felt himself a burden on the family and better off dead.
His wife, Betty, with the help of some friends, decided to organise a trip to the Lourdes shrine in an attempt to revive his spirits.
While he was no more devout than most Catholics of the time, Veronica says, he returned from France a changed man: imbued with a new sense of optimism.
He told a family member that although he wasn’t cured, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. “Even though my eyes and ears don’t work, I’m the very same person I was . . . the only question is what can I do now?”
From that point on, Hanlon threw himself into the only field of medicine he felt he could still practise as a deaf-blind person, physiotherapy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as it had never been attempted before, an application to study the discipline at a prominent Dublin college was refused on the grounds it was simply “not possible” given his disabilities.
Veronica says her father bluntly told the college authorities: “Look, don’t tell me what’s not possible. Let me try first and I’ll tell you if it’s possible or not.”
Undeterred by the initial rejection, however, he applied to study in London and received special permission to attend lectures in the company of a secretary who interpreted the classes for him on the palms of his hands, a process of communication for deaf-blind people known as tactile signing.
Within six months and partly because of his previous medical training, the college awarded him an honorary degree.
Back in Dublin, Hanlon began working with a physiotherapist named Kathleen O’Rourke, who ran a remedial clinic for polio victims from the top floor of her apartment on the corner of Pembroke Street and Leeson Street.
In an era when there was no known cure for polio, outbreaks such as those in Dublin and Cork in the 1940s and ’50s affected thousands and caused near hysteria.
Many of those who survived were left battling with the debilitating aftermath of the disease, known as post-polio syndrome. The syndrome typically left patients with severe muscle and joint pain, often badly impairing mobility.
O’Rourke, who specialised in treating polio victims with intense physiotherapy, would eventually go on to establish Dublin’s Central Remedial Clinic, now based in Clontarf.
Hanlon soon became adept at diagnosing the early signs of the disease.
Veronica remains convinced her father’s success in detecting the various stages of the disease was linked to his own disabilities which, she believes, enabled him to perceive non-visual signals from the body.
She recounts one episode where he recognised one patient’s symptoms on the basis of the subtle vibrations her gait made on the floor as she entered his consulting rooms.
As a result of his success with polio patients, other physicians began to refer patients to “the blind doctor”, as he was affectionately known, especially those with less obvious symptoms.
He eventually returned to work for the Richmond hospital; this time as a consultant physiotherapist as well as taking private rooms on Fitzwilliam Square.
Veronica says her father became so adept at translating tactile signing, which his wife Betty or his long-time secretary Josephine Kearney would perform on his hand during consultations, that he could answer patients in real time, giving the impression of normal conversation.
When asked if he noticed anything unusual about his doctor, one young patient only noted the fact that his doctor mysteriously wore sunglasses in winter.
As a schoolboy in Clongowes Wood and later in Blackrock College, Hanlon had excelled at sport, particularly rugby and diving.
He was also a first-rate golfer, playing off a handicap of two and winning the prestigious Lumsden Cup in 1939.
There is, perhaps, one anecdote which typifies, more than any other, Hanlon’s courage in the face of adversity.
He would, on occasion, arrange to meet Irish champion diver Eddie Heron at the Blackrock Baths in Dublin. To the disbelief of onlookers, Heron would guide Hanlon up to the high diving board, where both men would dive in unison.
According to Veronica, Heron would tap her father on his side, a split second before entering the water, so he could correct his position.
At the time, the demand for remedial polio services at the Central Remedial Clinic, then based in Goatstown, had become so great that a plan was hatched to move the clinic to a bigger campus in Clontarf.
Hanlon, who was by now something of a minor celebrity, his story having featured on a BBC programme called Silver Lining, was asked to lead a fundraising team to the US to drum up financial support for the new clinic.
As well as appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, Hanlon met the famous deaf-blind author and activist Helen Keller while in the US.
Having expressed his admiration for her, Keller surprised Hanlon by informing him it was she who should be in awe of him since she had been blind and deaf since birth and had known little else in contrast to the loss he had suffered.
Looking back, Veronica remembers her childhood as a remarkably normal and happy time.
As she and her siblings – John, Elizabeth and Jim – learned to sign, they began to act as their father’s eyes and ears, reporting the day’s events to him, she says.
By 1961, however, Hanlon’s heart had begun to deteriorate; he suffered several heart attacks in the early part of the year.
Against his doctor’s advice, he travelled to Lourdes in the summer, as he had done every year since losing his sight.
On a warm night in June after visiting the shrine’s baths, Hanlon died in the Asile hospital on the grounds of the Lourdes shrine, and was buried in an Irish plot in Lourdes.
Announcing his death, a French television report described him as a man of great courage and as a “hero for all”.
To this day, flowers are still left at the commemorative plaque dedicated to Hanlon at the entrance to the cemetery.
