It was a big, happy party, like all the Gowens' parties. As this one was celebrating the retirement of Dr John Gowen at the age of 83, after over half-a-century of medical practice in Youghal, Co Cork, there was an inevitable note of poignancy. But, with 18 grandchildren present, it was, equally inevitably, mostly noisy and cheerful, writes Peter Thompson
The location certainly helped. For over 50 years, the Gowens' home has been the beautiful Strand House at South Abbey in this pretty East Cork town, famous for its Clock Tower and its connections with Sir Walter Raleigh. This marvellous, small Georgian mansion, which dates from the 1740s, is situated just over the sea-wall from the Blackwater's estuary. With its spacious reception rooms on either side of a wide, airy, hallway, an elegant curved staircase leading up to its seven bedrooms, it must have been a great place to grow up for the Gowens' nine children.
On returning to his native Cork from dreary, post-war Manchester in 1952, Dr Gowen and his wife Margaret (née McHenry, a fellow doctor whom he had met at UCC's Medical School, whose father was Professor of Physics at the university, and the progenitor of the McHenry Theorem) both wanted a bit of style.
Fortunately, style came cheap in the Youghal of those depressed times. At the auction to buy Strand House, then semi-derelict, Dr Gowen and a local solicitor were not only the only bidders, they were the only people present apart from the auctioneer. The solicitor bid £1,000; Dr Gowen £1,100. Result: house withdrawn.
On the way out, Dr Gowen caught up with the agent, and made his move. "How much?" he asked.
"Would you give us another hundred?" said the desperate man.
"Done," said the doctor. That is how the Gowens came to own one of the best houses in Co Cork.
And, as it happens, that was how an exceptional medical practice began. Its history has a certain resonance in the Ireland of spiralling health costs and controversies about medical coteries protecting their respective patches.
The undoubted style of Strand House certainly extends to its owner. Despite a crippling stroke last year, which occasioned his retirement, Dr Gowen is still, as he always has been, immaculately turned out. He prefers tweeds, corduroys and cravats, all spotlessly clean and laundered, with highly polished brown shoes. He has never presented a remotely shabby appearance to the outside world - nor, indeed, to the inner world of Strand House.
This even extends to appearing, as he has on many irritated moments, in immaculate dressing gown and starched pyjamas before the battered youths of the town in his surgery, very early on a Sunday morning, when they have come seeking his help after a bottle fight in the streets. He once summed up his philosophy to me in the imperishable advice: "Peter, we are all shits; the trick is to be a stylish shit."
But there is substance behind Dr Gowen's style - the substance of his life's work.
When John Gowen commenced practice in Youghal in 1952, post-graduate training for general practitioners was unheard of. With his old professor at UCC, Denis O'Sullivan, he set out to change this, inspired by the establishment in England of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). Lecturers were brought over from the UK and a three-day summer school was founded at UCC, at which Irish GPs could catch up on the latest medical developments. In 1956, Dr Gowen and a small group of like-minded Irish doctors were admitted to the RCGP itself.
General practice, the primary care of the patient in the community before his or her illness becomes so severe that hospitalisation becomes necessary, was and remains a passion for Dr Gowen. He greatly regrets the division which has grown up since the second World War between GPs and consultants. "A GP can assess the patient in three dimensions," he says, "the physical, the psychological, and the social. A hospital doctor can't do this."
In the late 1960s, Dr Gowen became provost of the Southern Irish chapter of the RCGP, and served on the Commission on General Practice drawn up by our late President, Erskine Childers, when he was Minister for Health. He remembers that it wasn't popular with some people:
"The medical establishment didn't want a Commission into general practice," he remembers. "But by the late Seventies, we were able to get two years' training in hospitals for general practice [i.e., for newly qualified doctors who wanted to be GPs], plus a year's placement with a GP."
Ireland's GPs, - and, dare one say it, Ireland's patients - owe a lot to John Gowen, in my view. I hope they will join me in wishing him a happy retirement.
Mind you, I'm not sure that's really in prospect just yet. When I asked him, at the party, if he was looking forward to relaxing, he looked at me mischievously, and replied in his hooting Cork accent: "I'm looking forward to getting back to work!"