OBITUARY: Kilkenny-born medical specialist Francis Peter Muldowney (1928-2023)

The death of Professor Frank Muldowney on June 14 at the age of 95 brings to an end one of the most impressive stories of achievement in medical science by a person of his generation.

It could even be claimed that not since Abraham Colles has a Kilkenny-born professional made such an impact on the practice of medicine in his native country.

Colles was a member of one of Kilkenny’s most distinguished families — one that could trace its ancestry to his great-grandfather, a William Colles of Kilcollen, who was a pioneering surgeon in the second half of the 17th Century, an era when Nicholas Shee’s unfulfilled ambition for a Royal College of Physicians in Kilkenny was still topical.

Francis Peter Muldowney was born on June 6, 1928, the second youngest of six children of James and Alice Kathleen Muldowney (nee Lloyd), an English-born nurse who had come to Kilkenny to visit a friend.

The Lloyd pedigree was a notable one: Kathleen’s grandfather, Sir Horatio Lloyd, had been the Recorder of Chester, and was knighted for his service as a regional judge, one of only a handful to be so honoured.

The Muldowneys had originated in Ballyrafton, a townland that straddles the main Kilkenny-Castlecomer road west of Ballyfoyle.

Jeremiah Muldowney, his wife and family of five, had come into the city in the early years of the 20th century, becoming involved in providing transport services for the brewing industries there, and residing in Abbey Street opposite Smithwick's Brewery. 

The Clubhouse Hotel had a very complicated central heating system at the time but their son James was able to figure it out and he ran it for some years (the 1911 census describes him as an ‘engine driver’, a common term for anyone engaged in operating machinery).

James was involved with the IRA in the run-up to Irish independence, and when he died in 1950 at the age of just sixty, a tricolour was draped on the coffin on the morning of his funeral, his pallbearers were drawn from his old companions in the movement, and a gun salute was fired at the graveside.

Some of the younger members of the family who had not been aware of his involvement, were quite surprised at these developments, to say the least.

James Muldowney had also worked as a projectionist in the first Stallard's Theatre in Parliament Street and it was seemingly there that he first came to the notice of the visiting English belle (she liked, family lore says, the image of his eyelashes caught in the projector light!). 

They were married in 1923, by which time James was in his early thirties and Kathleen some ten years younger, and soon established themselves at No. 35 on the same street, a building that was then a hub of commercial activity.

The Muldowneys lived in the upstairs apartments in the building and James was soon conducting an auctioneering business from the ground floor, in partnership with his old volunteer companion Leo Dardis, later a district court clerk and acting county registrar. 

As well as acting as secretary to the Kilkenny Agricultural Show committee under the chairmanship of Major McCalmont, James was also involved in the administration of greyhound-racing and equestrian activities in the city.

The Muldowney family circle in Ireland was reduced by the emigration of James’s brother Patrick to the US and his sister Kathleen to Britain; his sisters Nellie and Delia married locally, giving the young Muldowneys some local Flynn (Dungarvan) and Kilkenny City (O’Carroll) cousins. 

Kathleen had one unmarried sister and one married brother in England, and this led to some of Frank’s older siblings gravitating there, as well as his mother after the death of her husband.

Frank received his early education at the Christian Brothers Primary School in James’s Street before entering St Kieran’s College in 1940 as a day pupil, in an era when the college was able to boast of a student body that featured the best of academic talent from the diocese of Ossory, many of them destined for priestly service throughout the English-speaking world. 

Thus Frank became part of a generation who went to achieve significant status at home or abroad during those decades - people like his particular friends Joe Lambe, Paddy Reynolds and Paul Crotty, and beyond that names like Paddy Dore, John and Michael Piert, Canice Treacy, Nicky Purcell, Martin Crotty, Frank McEvoy, the White brothers (Sean Tom and Liam) and the Kilroy bothers (Tom, Brendan and John). 

While he was a handball champion at school, Frank's favourite sport as a teenager was probably tennis, mainly for its social side - he also had a reputation as a party organiser and musician (he played the accordion and the clarinet).

The emphasis in sports in St Kieran’s was strictly on hurling, which Frank also played, but there was too a secret group of rugby afficionados who carried out an annual game of rugby in Kilkenny College wearing carefully disguised St. Kieran’s hurling jersies. 

He academic abilities were evident from the beginning - he came third in Ireland in the Intermediate Certificate examination, and won a scholarship to University College Dublin on the basis of his excellent Leaving Certificate results in Classics and Mathematics.

The medical tradition among St Kierans alumni was not an insubstantial one - in the 1940s and 1950s the college could boast of itself as the alma mater of prominent physicians such as Eugene O'Neill, Sylvester Bourke, Thomas Maher, Pierce Grace and Patrick Cassin.

And so Frank went to study medicine at UCD where he was always grateful to the Jesuits for giving him free board in Hatch Hall after the death of his father, when he thought he might have to give up his studies to support his family. 

He graduated in 1952 first in his class with first class honours. He also won the McArdle Gold Medal for surgery and the Mowbray Medal for Oratory. 

After graduating, he went to Edinburgh on a research scholarship and then to Harvard on a Rockefeller research scholarship.

In 1955 he married Margaret Phelan, familiarly known as Peggy, the daughter of Dr. William Phelan, county physician and official doctor to St Kieran’s College students, and his wife Margaret, the noted historian and stalwart of Kilkenny Archaeological Society.

The ceremony also featured the marriage of Peggy’s sister Ellen to Dr Edward Cody of Inistiog

As a pair of newly-wed doctors, Frank and Peggy started out in Edinburgh and moved to Boston, Liverpool and Manchester before finally coming back to Dublin at the beginning of the 1960s.

And so began a career in that would encompass the disciplines of nephrology, endocrinology, the operation of the human metabolism, and the associated areas of nutrition, dietetics and neuroscience.

That led to the final achievement of positions as Consultant at St Vincent's Hospital and Cardinal Cushing Research Professor of Medicine at University College, Dublin.

Though Peggy was a qualified doctor and worked in Edinburgh and was awarded a Diploma in Public Health in the early 1970s, on her 90th birthday she gave a speech during which she gestured to all the gathered family, saying “This is what I chose to do with my life.” “She was an extraordinary mother to her eight children,” according to her daughter Fleur.

Frank always loved technology - he always had the latest phone, camera or IPod. He set up his medical diagnostics software programme (eMedicine) as a new way for junior doctors and students to learn. Medical textbooks start by describing the disease and working backwards. Frank designed his system to work from the presented symptoms towards a diagnosis. 

The chapters were written by the leading doctors in their field in Ireland, the UK and the United States. Though the system was well received at the trial stage, he did not want to get into deep commercial territory in his advancing years. 

In 1966, Frank and Peggy had moved into what was by all accounts an old-fashioned house in the close southern suburbs of Dublin.

Together they transformed it and its garden into the happiest of family homes for their eight children and later their twenty much-loved grandchildren and even the first of their five great grandchildren. 

In her eulogy his daughter Fleur noted his attention to detail in every aspect of his life, professional and personal (his death notice had referred to him as a 'wonderfully exacting' father).

His surgery rounds at St. Vincent's were noted for a fastidious approach to every aspect of student participation - from preparation to posture to articulation to the application of simple common sense in assessing situations.

Among his colleagues at both St Vincents and UCD he was noted for his rigorous approach to diagnoses based on sound scientific fact, and if the facts were not there to meet the challenge, he went about discovering them, resulting in 95 separate published articles on his CV, the last one being in 2008 when he was 80. 

Similarly his presentations at international conferences were eagerly received and gave him a whole new circle of influence - and friends.

After he retired in the mid 1990s he was able to spend more time at Portmarnock Golf Club, where he had been a member for over 60 years (according to his daughter's eulogy, his own personal holy trinity was, possibly in ascending order, medicine, family and Portmarnock).

There he was honoured to be captain in 1982 when his signature white hat cut a dash on TV during the Carrolls Irish Open played at the course that year. 

Peggy Muldowney died in December 2020 and, unwilling to return without her to the house they had shared for over fifty years, he took up residence at Newtownpark House under the care of Anne Marie Woods who had worked with him on St Peter’s Ward at St Vincents. 

From there he maintained a busy social schedule, meeting family and friends for meals and outings up to the end.

In addition to his parents (his mother eventually returned to England where she remarried and was bereaved again, living on there until her death in 1975 at the age of 76), he was predeceased by his brothers Gerald in 2006 and Reginald (with whom he shared a passion for cars) in 2021 and by his sister Maureen, who had married Paddy Conway, a Kilkenny-born engineer who became a director of Mahon and McPhillips’ UK operations based in Gloucestershire (Paddy died in 2006, Maureen in 2017).
He is survived by his sisters Joan (Glendale, California) and Kathleen Bowe, Kilkenny City.

Most importantly, he has left five daughters and three sons (Peter, William, Maeve, Margaret, Hilary, James, Kathy and Fleur) to reflect the values of diverse interests, hard work and love of learning that he so fervently espoused throughout his life.
 

One followed his father's specialisation and practises as a nephrologist in California; two professed law, one specialising in the legal aspects of life sciences; four entered the world of business and finance and the remaining two became a teacher and a journalist respectively.

They also between them produced the twenty grandchildren on whom he doted, as he did on his five great-grand-children.

Always a man of deep faith, Frank Muldowney was exemplary to the last in his piety and observance.

His funeral mass, held at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook on June 19, with Monsignor O’Carroll as principal celebrant, was followed by cremation at the Victorian Chapel in Mount Jerome Cemetery.