David Stevens

When I was a student all I wanted to be was a an Obstetrician, but an SHO job
(in a part of the country that I will not identify!) and a particularly
aggressive set of midwives, soon put paid to that idea. Another factor that led
to me abandoning that career path was that I was pretty hopeless at surgery,
which would not have been that good in a such a specialty.

So - a career as some sort of a physician beckoned. A totally inability to hear
diastolic murmurs narrowed the field a bit and a dislike of the messier bits of
gastroenterology and dermatology narrowed it further. And then, an SHO job in
medicine (in another part of the country that I will also keep secret) with a
general physician who fancied himself as a neurologist changed things for me for
ever. He had a very simple approach to the subject of neurology, indeed he only
seemed to have three diagnoses - if they went unconscious they had epilepsy, if
they trembled it was Parkinson’s and if they couldn’t walk very well it was
Multiple Sclerosis - which all seemed pretty straight forward and which
suggested that this was the specialty for me. Then six months of neurosurgery,
doing the occasional burr hole, and an SHO and Registrar job with Bryan Matthews
in Neurology had me hooked. For those of you who may have heard of him, but who
have forgotten who he was, Bryan was a neurologist in Derby in the 1960s and he
was totally brilliant.

My Senior Registrar job was in Leeds with Hugh Garland - who really was larger
than life and a little bit naughty at times. During my time in Leeds I spent
eighteen months as a Research Fellow in the University Department of Genetics
and did some work on Huntington’s Chorea (as it was called in those days). This
led to an MD and membership of the World Federation of Neurology Research group
on the condition. Eventually I spent eight years as the Secretary-General of
that group - which sounds rather grand, but it wasn’t really. Writing letters,
organising workshops every two years and occasionally attending WFN Research
Committee meetings. Interesting and an opportunity to attend conferences all
over the world - a bit like Roy Weller...

Whilst I was Bryan Matthew’s registrar we collaborated with two American
researchers in the first experiments of transmitting (conventional)
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to chimpanzees, which demonstrated that this was very
much not the degenerative disease that had previously been thought. I was a
co-author of one of the papers describing this experiment. After all of this,
one of the Americans got the Nobel Prize, Bryan Matthews became Professor of
Neurology at Oxford and I got a job ... in Gloucester - ah well.

For 21 years from 1973 I was single handed looking after the neurology for
Gloucestershire and parts of Herefordshire and only in 1994 did I acquire a
colleague. Now there are four of them and they want a fifth... I saw a huge
amount of neurology during the time that I was on my own and loved every minute
of it. I even described a new disease, which some of my ex-registrars (but
nobody else) like to call Stevens’ Disease.

I was very involved with the Association of British Neurologist in the later
years of my career and looked after the finances of the Association and then the
finances of the World Congress of Neurology held in London in 2001. Rather late
in life I discovered a talent I didn’t know I had.

I retired from the NHS on the very last day of the last millennium and over the
years have slowly tailed off the work. Bit by bit I gave up private practice and
then I slowly gave up medico-legal work, so that now all I do is to act as one
of the Trustees on the vCJD Trust set up by the government in the aftermath of
the BSE problem.

My wife Ute and I travel a lot. We have been to the Antarctic twice, the Arctic
once, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and really rather a large number of other
places around the world. The pictures are of Ute watching the old fellow having
a chat with a Gentoo Penguin on the shore of Paradise Harbour on the Antarctic
Peninsula in March 2010.