Davis Coakley obituary: Doctor, writer and pioneer of geriatric medicine

Born: August 8th, 1946.

Died: September 25th, 2022.

Davis Coakley, who has died after an illness championed the development of geriatric medicine in Ireland. He also made his mark as an author of 18 books, as an accomplished historian, and as a teacher and academic.

The crowning achievement of his professional life was the establishment of the Mercers Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA), a facility of international renown for the care of older people on the grounds of St James’s Hospital, Dublin. Some 30 years after first submitting a case to government, and persisting through difficult periods of health service cutbacks, he saw MISA opened by President Michael D Higgins in December 2016.

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Coakley led negotiations with the American charity Atlantic Philanthropies, whose funding was key to realising plans for MISA. Following the closure in 1983 of Mercer’s Hospital, a venerable Dublin voluntary hospital, and mindful that its charter stated the hospital was to provide for the sick and poor of the city of Dublin, Coakley successfully negotiated that income from the sale of Mercer’s Hospital should be used for the betterment of the healthcare of older people in Dublin. This funding led to the establishment of the Mercers Institute for Research on Ageing at St James’s, an important stepping stone to the subsequent creation of MISA.

Coakley’s quiet negotiating skills, his vision, and his ability to identify hitherto unseen potential in fellow professionals served him well as the two-term Dean of Health Sciences at Trinity in the 1990s. He was a key figure in the development of academic nursing, occupational therapy and speech therapy in the college. Unsurprisingly, he also influenced the development of medical humanities as an undergraduate course for students. More recently, he campaigned to preserve the old Trinity Anatomy Building, recognising it had many rare features that made it unique in these islands.

Coakley spent his early years in Cork city, the third of four sons born to Patrick and Nora Coakley. Following secondary education at Sullivan’s Quay School, in 1965 he entered medical school in UCC on a scholarship. Qualifying with first class honours in medicine in 1971, he undertook postgraduate training in Cork, Dublin and Cardiff, before he was appointed senior lecturer in geriatric medicine in the University of Manchester. He returned to Dublin in 1979 as consultant physician in St. James’s Hospital and senior lecturer in Trinity College Dublin. He was appointed to a personal chair in medical gerontology by the university in 1996, the first such academic appointment in the country.

Coakley married Mary Horgan in 1973. They met when Mary was in her first few weeks as a university student. They had a shared enthusiasm for writing, and in 1975 published Wit and Wine, Literary and Artistic Cork in the early Nineteenth Century.

Medical history

As a writer, Coakley is probably best known for his books on medical history. Two substantial contributions stand out: The Irish School of Medicine in the 19th Century, published in 1988 and Irish Masters of Medicine, which appeared in 1992.

Coakley was also instrumental in preserving Oscar Wilde’s birthplace, 21 Westland Row, which is now a creative writing centre in TCD.

He is survived by his wife Mary, sons Peter, Stephen, John Davis and James, daughter-in-law Áine and four grandchildren.