Cowell, John Saint Patrick (1912–2008), medical administrator and writer, was born 13 March 1912 in Audenshaw, Lancashire, the only son of Dr William J. Cowell and his wife Adeline (née Kelly) (d. 1956). Drawn home by the abundant shooting and fishing, William Cowell returned to his native Skreen, Co. Sligo, after serving in the first world war, and practised as a dispensary doctor and RIC medical officer. He was a proud catholic unionist who treated casualties from both sides during the war of independence. After his death in November 1922, local republican troops followed the cortege sixteen miles to his interment at the family vault in Kilglass, Co. Sligo.
John, who adored Sligo's landscape and mythology, from 1926 boarded at Summerhill College, Sligo – the only thing in the county he detested. He recalled that this experience 'made you either a priest or an anti-cleric' (Ir. Independent, 12 June 1978). The family, comprising John, his three sisters and their mother, moved to 61 Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin, in 1930. After briefly attending Skerry's College in Dublin, Cowell worked as a clerk in the ESB (1930–35). In his spare time he acted with Longford Productions at the Gate Theatre (1936–7), who paid him 10 shillings a week for playing minor roles in plays such as 'Twelfth night' and 'The duchess of Malfi'. In 1937 he entered the RCSI to study medicine (1937). While there, he wrote, produced and directed 'Birds in the wilderness' for the RCSI dramatic society (1939), before graduating licentiate of the RCSI and RCPI in 1942. Training as a house surgeon and physician in the Meath and Rotunda hospitals in Dublin (1943), he specialised in TB, and worked as an assistant medical officer in Northampton (1943) and then at Grove Park Chest Hospital, London (1944). Promoted there to acting deputy medical superintendent (1945), he served as resident medical officer at the Standish Chest Hospital, Gloucestershire, and was assistant county TB officer to Gloucestershire County Council.
Returning to Dublin in March 1946, Cowell was physician and assistant TB officer to the first Mass Radiography Centre in Ireland, run by Dublin Corporation. Graduating with a diploma in public health from UCD (1947), he worked with both Dublin Corporation and County Council in a variety of public, TB and schools health roles. Advocating a rigorous approach to TB treatment that would address the causes and spread of infection, he worked as a vaccinator (1949–50) with the National BCG Committee (NBCGC) established by Noel Browne (qv) in July 1949, based at St Ultan's Hospital, Dublin, before being appointed medical director of the NBCGC in March 1950.
Building on the work of Dorothy Stopford-Price (qv), who had begun BCG vaccinations at St Ultan's in 1937, Cowell led the nationwide inoculation campaign from 1950, importing supplies of vaccines (largely from Scandinavia), expanding the BCG programme, collecting and maintaining rigorous records, while also training and supervising vaccinators and publicising the benefits of BCG to the medical profession and the general public. The government spent £600 treating each TB patient in the mid 1950s, whereas the cost of the BCG vaccination was negligible. Initially focusing on 5 to14 year olds, the campaign was gradually expanded through the 1950s to teacher training colleges, the defence forces, the ESB and other semi-state and public bodies, community organisations such as Macra na Feirme and the ICA, and large factories and employers. Near-complete official acceptance of BCG as an effective TB preventative was marked by new entrants to the civil service being inoculated from 1957.
Cowell was a tireless promoter of the campaign (variously managing twenty-four to forty-five staff), the implementation of which was from 1954 gradually shifted to local authorities, whose staff were trained and organised by the NBCGC. In time, the rigorous data collection and analysis proved as valuable as the lives spared, and were the foundation of several papers Cowell published in the Irish Journal of Medical Science. The annual reports of the NBCGC demonstrated that young adults living on the western seaboard exhibited the least resistance to TB, yet were the most likely to emigrate; if infected with TB, they were likely to return and spread the disease amongst their locality. Collectively, the records generated by the NBCGC campaign (over one million within a complex system devised by Cowell that was adopted overseas) effectively refuted claims in the UK and elsewhere of an Irish societal or genetic propensity to spread the disease. As TB mortality declined, Cowell campaigned against complacency as the number of new TB cases rebounded by 1960, propounding the benefits of follow-up tuberculin testing and BCG revaccination.
Awarded a WHO travelling fellowship (1961), Cowell visited TB treatment centres in Paris, Copenhagen, Roskilde, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Although offered posts by the WHO and the British Medical Research Council, he chose to remain in Dublin for family reasons. He was close to his mother and her sister, who had effectively raised him and supported his medical studies, as well as his three sisters and their families. Resigning from the NBCGC in November 1962, he was briefly executive secretary of the Royal Irish Academy (1963), before becoming assistant secretary (later styled deputy secretary) of the Irish Medical Association (IMA). Lobbying for improved conditions for junior doctors, he also spearheaded the revival of the recently moribund Irish Medical and Hospital Directory from 1975. He was a board member of St Ultan's Hospital (1969–72), a fellow of the RAMI, and a member of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland.
Cowell continued to write for the stage, and was awarded prizes at the Kerry Drama Festival in 1949 and 1953. His play 'The mask of night' premiered at the Dagg Hall, Westland Row, Dublin, in November 1961; 'Saint Luke's Day' was performed there in February 1963 with all proceeds going to the Kathleen Lynn (qv) memorial fund. The latter play was revived in 1964, and adapted for broadcast by Radio Éireann in 1969. Acting in occasional fringe productions around the Dublin Theatre Festival (1961–3), Cowell also contributed to Focus magazine, scripted episodes of 'Treasure House' on Radio Éireann (1978–9), and was an occasional panellist on RTÉ's arts programmes. Increasingly turning to writing, he published a novel, The begrudgers (1978), about a returning emigrant doctor facing a new Ireland as commerce, politics and violence flare. A number one bestseller for three months, the title presaged his ongoing relationship with the O'Brien Press; a paperback edition appeared in 1983.
Cowell also wrote Where they lived in Dublin (1980), comprising thematic vignettes of various famous and infamous figures who resided in the city. Drawing on his own recollections and his ongoing friendship with Christine Pakenham (qv), he wrote No profit but the name: the Longfords and the Gate Theatre (1988) to ensure that Micheál MacLiammóir (qv) and Hilton Edwards (qv) did not receive all the credit for the Gate's achievements. Part childhood memoir, Cowell's Sligo, land of Yeats' desire (1990) is principally an account of W. B. Yeats (qv), his lineage, and how the landscape and mythology of the area influenced Yeats's work. Cowell's last book was a biography of the revolutionary and doctor Brigid Lyons Thornton (qv), whom he had known since his time as a student on the DPH. Drawn from their tape-recorded conversations, A noontide blazing: Brigid Lyons Thornton, rebel, soldier, doctor (2005) is strongest when discussing her TB work, especially early BCG vaccination schemes in Dublin; all proceeds from the book went to the Defence Forces Benevolent Fund.
Retiring from the IMA in 1990, from that year Cowell was an honorary life member of the association. Supporting his mother and aunt in their old age, he never married and lived at the family home on Marlborough Road, and later at 63 Ardoyne House, Pembroke Park, Ballsbridge. He continued to attend the opening nights of plays in Dublin well into old age. Cowell died 24 July 2008 and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery.