JOHN NORMAN PARKER Moore was born in Beragh, Co Tyrone, in 1911. He was the only son among four children and his relationship with his three sisters, Fran, Dorothy and Mildred, was a close one. He was a boarder at Methodists' College in Belfast, and it was while at school that he first contracted tuberculosis. He was later to suggest that having had TB was a good experience in his preparation for becoming a doctor helping him to develop sympathy for the ill.
He had a distinguished undergraduate medical career at Trinity College, then trained in psychiatry at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries. The real attraction there was Professor Willy MayerGross, a dynamic, charismatic and gifted teacher one of that constellation of great Jewish refugees that so enriched British medicine during the late 1930s and 1940s. Moore was greatly influenced by Mayer Gross. He was to spend six years at the Crichton and was made deputy medical director before being invited to return to St Patrick's as medical director, which he did in 1946.
This was where he remained until his retirement in 1979. When he took office, St Patrick's was somewhat stuck in a time warp of Victorian rigidity. The wards were rigidly segregated they were for the most part locked and the atmosphere was disciplined but institutional. Norman Moore, aided by efficient and loyal staff picked by himself, set about a revolution in psychiatric care.
He was, from the outset, a therapeutic enthusiast. He took to using the newly developed major tranquillisers and antidepressants with relish, exuded optimism and insisted that psychiatric illness was, for the most part, eminently treatable. What was needed was appropriate knowledge, a healing atmosphere, an optimistic therapist and time. He fostered training, developed out patient care, built up the staff. He could be stern, even intimidating yet the only thing he could not forgive was indifference.
The hospital under his influence, supported by a wise board of governors, gave him his head and he repaid their confidence by making St Patrick's a byword for dedication, understanding and trust. Patient turnover soared, length of stay fell and the hospital embarked on a major programme of redevelopment which continued throughout his time in office.
He was always open to new ideas. He pioneered the idea of the patient lecture patients being informed about the nature of psychiatric illness, the treatments available, the ways to stay well. He was a vigorous supporter of voluntary organisations, his seminal role in the arrival of Alcoholics Anonymous in Ireland being a ease in point. But the driving force, at all times, was his love for the hospital. Throughout his life he saw it and its role in solemn, almost religious terms. It was a treasure of the nation, bequeathed to us by the beneficence and foresight of Swift to provide succour, support, relief and care for generations of psychiatrically ill.
In his private life he was a devoted family man and a passionate fisherman and gardener. While he avoided the public arena for the most part, he would when required take up the cudgels for psychiatry. He was a member of the 1966 Commission on Mental Health, which paved the way for the changes in psychiatric planning over the next three decades. He was the voice of psychiatry in the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and a distinguished Fellow, the psychiatrist most trusted by physicians and surgeons. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, served with distinction on Comhairle na nOspideal and for many on the Irish Medical Council.
Moore was the respectable, and the respected, face of Irish psychiatry. He nurtured the close ties between psychiatry and medicine by providing, for many years, psychiatric clinics at the Adelaide and the Meath. He battled with and convinced the newly formed Voluntary Health Insurance Board of the right of psychiatric patients to have the same cover as their physically ill counterparts, a right which his successors still fight to protect against the depredations of foreign insurers and the European trade directorate.
Always committed to the closest links between independent and state psychiatry, and keen to develop a research tradition akin to that he had seen at the Crichton, he attracted back from the US the late Peter Beckett to be the first professor of psychiatry at Trinity College. Together they developed, with the Eastern Health Board, the pioneering acute psychiatric unit at St James's Hospital, linked with Trinity College and serving the population of a sector of Dublin which flourishes to this day.
He was one of the great figures of Irish medicine in this century and his legacy, in the shape of the hospital he so magnificently served and the generations of young men and women he so cardinally influenced, is incomparable. His has been the fullest of lives, a fact I do most fervently desire will be of great comfort to his gracious wife Jane, to his sons and their partners, Dermot and Clare, Niall and Catherine, Alan and Lucy, David and Lucinda, Christopher and Michael, his grandchildren and all his former colleagues and friends and patients who cherish him and mourn his passing.