My buddy Enrique Zapata-Bravo, who has died aged 83, was a psychiatrist in hospitals and safe items throughout the nation, a supporter of refugees with a historical past of torture and an professional who travelled on World Well being Group missions in Africa.
Having skilled in psychiatry in Oxford and Buckinghamshire, Enrique grew to become a member of the Royal School of Psychiatrists in 1986. Over the next many years he labored as a guide psychiatrist in Oxford, Milton Keynes and Northampton; lectured in Canada, Spain, Argentina and Chile; taught postgraduate college students; and printed authentic analysis.
From the Eighties he labored tirelessly for victims of torture as an unbiased guide and a medico-legal professional on the Helen Bamber Basis, serving to scores of refugees to stay within the UK. In 2019, he made a landmark contribution in the case of KV, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, by convincing the supreme court docket that the person had certainly been tortured and that his wounds weren’t self-inflicted, because the Residence Workplace claimed.
Born in Osorno within the south of Chile, Enrique attended the Liceo de Hombres de Osorno, and went to medical college on the College of Chile, Santiago, the place has additionally took a post-graduate course in public well being. He met Flor Duran, then a scholar, later a trainer, in a scholar summer time camp within the southern mountains, working with the impoverished Mapuche communities of Auraucania.
Shortly after they married, in 1964, he arrange a pioneering clinic for the extensively dispersed and poor inhabitants within the far south. Later, as a guide in chest medication on the instructing hospital Jose Joaquin Aguirre in Santiago, he labored with miners within the copper belt.
He was on the peak of his profession, working as director of the Institute of Respiratory Drugs on the College of Chile, when President Salvador Allende was overthrown by Basic Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Three years later, when Pinochet’s navy started to focus on them and their pals, Enrique, Flor and their two sons left the nation and arrived in Oxford with nothing.
It was by Flor’s connections with the World College Service that I met the couple and taught them English. Enrique had come to Oxford to undertake medical analysis on the chest clinic on the Churchill hospital, and gained a grasp’s from the College of Oxford in 1978. Discovering that he wanted to retake all his exams – in English this time – as a way to practise, he accepted the problem and and opted for one more specialism, psychiatry. He selected to remain within the UK, the place his third son was born. After retirement, Enrique continued working as a locum till 2022, however in his later life he performed chess and tennis and shaped a musical group, performing and explaining tangos and sambas to enthusiastic audiences.
He’s survived by Flor, their sons, Felipe, Camilo and Xavier, and grandchildren, Annabella, Lucas, Toni and Kika.
