Robert Douglas Thornes, who died recently, was a dedicated researcher in the science of medicine, who believed that the intuitive instinct should not be totally subservient to the scientific method that now governs medical research.
Douglas Thornes's father, John, a widowed Scotsman who came to Ireland in the early years of the 20th century to establish Thornes & Co, which became a well-known skin and hide provider in Blackpitts. He married Hannah Hunter, originally from Ladybank in Scotland, whose family carried on a business in Galway making perambulators.
The couple settled in Dún Laoghaire, and their only child, Douglas, was sent to the King's Hospital School in Blackhall Place.
When he was 12 his father died suddenly, and with the sale of the family business impoverished circumstances forced him to leave school after his Intermediate Certificate and to find work with the new owners of his father's factory.
In 1946, when conditions had improved, he enrolled as a medical student in Trinity College Dublin, where he qualified with honours in 1951. He interned in the Royal City of Dublin Hospital, Baggot Street, and won the Wheeler Prize in Surgery.
His early postgraduate years were spent at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Boston Lying-in Hospital under Duncan Reid, where he was awarded the Charles H. Hood Foundation Fellowship in Obstetrics.
There he had the good fortune to work under Prof John Enders, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in poliomyelitis, and Dr Orjan Ouchterlony, who stimulated his interest in immunology.
He was awarded his MD by Dublin University in 1958 for his thesis entitled Proteins in Pregnancy. In 1959 he was appointed the Smith Scholar in Pathology at TCD, engaging in cancer research with R.A.Q. O'Meara at St Luke's Hospital.
O'Meara had postulated the role of fibrin in the growth of malignant tumours, and this motivated Thornes's interest in fibrinolysis and in the study of host defence mechanisms.
At this time and for most of his earlier medical career he had been dependent financially on research grants. While reading for his PhD in Trinity College in 1961, the Inspector of Taxes demanded income tax on these meagre funds.
He took his case to the Circuit Court, and Judge Binchy issued a ruling in his favour that research grants be exempt from income tax; the declaration was important to the fostering of scientific research in an age when funding was abysmally poor, and the privilege is enjoyed today by all full-time students reading for higher degrees,
In the early 1960s he was appointed consultant oncologist at the International Missionary Training Hospital in Drogheda, where he established a warm relationship with Mother Mary Martin.
In 1963 he was invited by Prof Colman Byrnes to set up a fibrinolytic laboratory in the surgical thoracic unit in the Richmond Hospital. He enlisted the help of Jack Cruise and Ben Dunne snr to establish a unit entirely dedicated to research on the hospital campus, which was a novel idea at the time. The facility was officially opened in 1970 as the Colman K. Byrnes Research Centre.
In 1965 he was appointed reader in clinical science in the Department of Medicine, under Prof Alan Thompson, and a visiting lecturer in pathology to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he collaborated with Prof Sumner Wood jnr. They developed the technique of time-lapse photography to demonstrate that warfarin inhibited the locomotion of cancer cells without affecting normal cells. In 1969 he was appointed to the chair in experimental medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Thornes's approach to disease was at the time unconventional in that he not only sought the reason patients contracted disease but also why healthy patients did not. He hypothesised that host defence mechanisms and immune systems played a major role and so he was always careful to preserve that line of defence in his treatment regimens and to stimulate it when he discovered it was compromised.
He maintained that it did not matter what malady one had once it could be contained, and when that control was lost he provided a hospice-like treatment regimen to ensure that none of his patients would endure the pain often associated with terminal disease. This, like many of his ideas, was years before its time.
He was an enthusiastic sailor and a member of numerous yacht clubs, including the Water Wags, the Royal Irish, the Royal Albert and Howth. In Trinity he ran the University Sailing Club and aspired unsuccessfully to a place on the Irish team for the Helsinki Olympics.
A recent article on the foundation of UCD Sailing Club credited the club's existence to "the energy and efforts of Douglas Thornes, a medical student at Trinity College". In his efforts to drum up opposition for Trinity, he hounded some UCD students to start a club, which they did in 1948. When this flagged due to a lack of funds, he founded the University Sailing Association of Ireland, to run fundraising events to support the varsity clubs. He won the Helmsman Championship on numerous occasions in the Dublin Bay 21-footer, Garavogue.
Ironically Thornes contracted cancer of the lung, which he had fought all his life. Being the dissenter he was he spurned the advice of the experts to go on the standard treatment which "guaranteed" him six more months to live.
True to his own convictions he prescribed one of his own regimens of low-dose chemotherapy every three weeks with adjuvant low-dose warfarin and astounded his peers by surviving for 2½ years.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and his children, Peter, Helena, Susan, Brian and Victoria.
Robert Douglas Thornes: born August 15th, 1926; died February 9th, 2004