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Philip: What an Astonishing Life Was His https://www.nysun.com/foreign/philip-what-an-astonishing-life-was-his/91472/ As a person in my 70s, I cannot remember when Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was not a prominent public figure well known in this country and much of the world. It does not seem like 70 years ago when my mother took my brother and me to see Princess Elizabeth and her almost new husband pass by on their way to look at E.P. Taylors racehorses at Windfields Farm, now the Toronto community of Don Mills. What an astonishing life was his. Because his ancestors were in the tangled web of European monarchy, he was a Greek and a Danish prince before becoming a member of the British Royal Family. His father and many of his in-laws and some of his siblings were Nazi sympathizers or adherents even as his mother, an estranged wife and eccentric woman, was deemed a righteous gentile and is honored at Yad Vashem for her protection of victims of the Nazi occupation of Greece.
After early work with head injury patients, a career in neurology beckoned for Alwyn Lishman, but he decided he was more interested in the mind, and undertook psychiatric training Alwyn Lishman liked to tell people that he wrote his classic textbook Organic Psychiatry (1978) only because the £500 advance would enable him to buy the Bechstein grand piano that he coveted. Yet he put his heart and soul into it, setting the subject of neuropsychiatry on a new footing, and trained generations of successors to approach mental illness with insights from both brain and mind. Trained in neurology and psychiatry, Lishman, who has died aged 89, was not the first to bridge the two subjects. There was a strong tradition among German neurologists of the late-19th century to look for underlying physical causes for conditions such as dementia and schizophrenia. But when he qualified in medicine in postwar Britain, Lishman found that neurology had little to say about the mind, while psychiatry was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. He made it his mission to build a new discipline that combined the two. While using newly available techniques to explore abnormalities in the brain, he rooted his practice in psychiatry, listening to his patients and taking their circumstances into account.