Crusading GP inspired by a child’s plight
mY DAD had plenty on his plate, what with five children and working as a GP in the rural Weardale Practice in County Durham for 28 years until his retirement in 1997.
Yet it was his commitment to do his very best for his patients that led him to become a pioneering researcher into a condition that in those days was known as mE, now chronic fatigue syndrome.
During the early Eighties, a boy of 14 came to see him with all the symptoms. Dad wanted to get to the bottom of what was causing it, but mE was at the time belittled in NHS circles as not a ‘real’ condition.
He became heavily involved in the fledgling John Richardson Research Group, a medical charity in the north- east of England, ultimately leading its work to promote greater understanding and awareness, as well as more effective treatment.
His commitment included running mE clinics, with my mother Eileen, a nurse, at his side, but it stretched to delivering lectures all round the country and building links with colleagues in Norway, Canada and Israel.
He continued with the clinics until two years ago, and the onset of the ill-health that preceded his peaceful death. In recent years his view on chronic fatigue syndrome — once a lonely one — has increasingly become mainstream, to the benefit of many sufferers.
But Dad never let his crusade over mE cause him to short-change his other patients.
Dad was a war baby, but his own father didn’t return from wartime service to their home in Annfield Plain near Consett until 1946. The eldest of three brothers, Dad won a place at Stanley Grammar School. In 1954, aged 14, he fell ill and missed most of his third year at school, but it was an experience that helped lead him into medicine.
On qualifying, his commitment and compassion made him popular throughout Weardale. For him, being a GP was not a job, it was a calling. Not one, though, that he allowed to distract him from being a doting father to Christine, Lara, Tanya, Felicity and me, and later a fun-loving, hands-on grandpa to matthew, Oliver, Ellie and Oscar.
He died shortly before what would have been my parents’ ruby wedding anniversary. As death approached, typically of him, his main concern was not for himself, but that our mother would be well looked after when he was no longer by her side.
JAmes IrvInG spurr, born september 26, 1940, died July 12, 2018, aged 77.