My uncle, Denis Keating, who has died aged 88, was a geriatrician who championed the speciality in Eire and helped to increase specialist medical companies for older individuals.
Denis was born in Dublin, an solely son with 5 sisters, to Lucy (nee Killackey), a secretary, and Daniel Keating, a civil service accountant.
As a boy, he was precocious. Attending Terenure school, Dublin, he was recognized to dawdle on the way in which to high school, analyzing bugs and flowers. He later attended the Cistercian school in Roscrea, Tipperary, as a boarding pupil, finishing his Irish leaving certificates on the early age of 16. He studied medication at College Faculty Dublin, the place he certified on the age of twenty-two in 1958.
Following appointments in Dublin, Limerick and Cork, within the late Nineteen Sixties Denis labored in geriatric medication with Bernard Isaacs at Birmingham College. After a quick interval in Oxford, he was appointed in 1973 as marketing consultant doctor in geriatric medication to the evolving North Dublin geriatric service primarily based at St Mary’s hospital, Phoenix Park, and at Richmond and Connolly hospitals. In 1975, he turned the primary marketing consultant doctor in geriatric medication in St Vincent’s hospital, Dublin.
Denis was obsessed with selling geriatric medication and the wants of older individuals. When he arrived at St Vincent’s, there have been no devoted geriatric acute evaluation and rehabilitation amenities. He succeeded in pushing for the development of a cutting-edge unit at a time when public cash was scarce and there was little help for geriatric medication.
In 1974 Denis was a founding member of the Irish Society of Physicians in Geriatric Drugs and its president from 1998 to 2000. He was additionally a president of the Irish Gerontological Society. Nice firm and obsessed with his work, he impressed many medical college students and medical doctors to pursue a profession within the discipline.
In 1999 he retired from St Vincent’s, however continued to practise at Tallaght College hospital, St Michael’s hospital in Dún Laoghaire and St John of God hospital, Dublin, till 2005, and retired from non-public observe in 2010.
Exterior medication he had a eager curiosity in historical past and music and often attended the opera. He was a delicate, beneficiant and compassionate man, who all the time fed stray cats.
He’s survived by his sister Frances and by 14 nephews and nieces.
