Burkitt, Denis Parsons (1911–93), surgeon and epidemiologist, was born 28 February 1911 at Lawnakilla, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, elder son among three children of James Parsons Burkitt (qv), county surveyor and ornithologist, and Gwendoline Burkitt, daughter of William Henry Hill, architect. Denis was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen; after losing an eye in a playground accident he attended a Welsh preparatory school at Trearddur Bay, and Dean Close, Cheltenham, England. Returning to Ireland in 1929 to study engineering in TCD, he transferred to medicine following a spiritual experience which confirmed his Christian faith and inspired his future life. Awarded the Adelaide Hospital's Hudson prize with silver medal, he graduated MB (1935) and MD (1946). He worked in hospitals in Ireland and England, and after obtaining a fellowship (1938) from the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, he became a ship's surgeon on a voyage to Manchuria, an experience which determined his commitment to the developing world. He subsequently served as a surgeon in the RAMC (1941–6) in England, East Africa, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
Appointed medical officer with the British colonial office in Uganda (1946), he worked in a small bush hospital in Lira, Langa district, where he observed that many of the patients who suffered from hydrocele came from a particular area. This prompted his first paper in the geographical distribution of disease (‘Primary hydrocele and its treatment’, The Lancet (13 June 1951), 1341–3). In 1948 he moved to Mulago Hospital in Kampala, where he was officially recognised as a surgeon, and lectured in surgery at Makerere University College medical school. Distressed by the number of amputations he had to perform without any possibility of replacement with artificial limbs, he attended a course on orthopaedic surgery in London during his first leave. Discovering that inexpensive artificial limbs could readily be made from plastic, he returned to Kampala and established a workshop for making artificial limbs which revolutionised the lives of many disabled people; it was subsequently directed by an orthopaedic surgeon and became a training centre for African doctors.
Burkitt began research on tumours in 1957 and was the first to describe a lethal cancer commonly suffered by African children, which from 1963 was known as Burkitt's lymphoma. His observation that it was confined to children of the north and east of Uganda led to epidemiological research that indicated that the lymphoma was confined to a five-million-square-mile belt across equatorial Africa, which became known as the ‘lymphoma belt’. Burkitt published his results as ‘A sarcoma involving the jaws of African children’ (British Journal of Surgery, xlvi, no. 197 (November 1958), 218–23), which, though unremarked at the time, became a citation classic. Continuing research into the tumour, he embarked in 1961 on his now famous ten-thousand-mile medical safari across Africa and subsequently noted the parallel incidence of the lymphoma and malaria; in collaboration with virologist M. A. Epstein and other colleagues, it was demonstrated that the lymphoma was linked to the presence of a virus (later known as Epstein–Barr virus) in children whose immune system was depressed by chronic malaria. This was the first demonstration of a causal link between a virus and a human cancer, and it changed the direction of much cancer research. Despite working in primitive conditions, he made a major breakthrough in cancer treatment when he was able to cure the lymphoma by chemotherapy; at that time it was the only cancer (with the exception of choriocarcinoma) that could be cured by chemotherapy alone. His work is considered to be one of the most significant contributions to cancer research in the twentieth century.
In 1964 he resigned his surgical appointment and joined the Medical Research Council (1964–76), moving from Kampala to London (1966), and was later appointed honorary senior research fellow at St Thomas’ Hospital medical school, London (1976–84). He concentrated on epidemiological research which entailed extensive travels throughout the world charting the incidence, varied distribution, and possible environmental factors in the aetiology of different cancers. He helped to establish the relationship between many diseases of western society and the lack of dietary fibre, making a second major contribution to medical science when he published his citation classic ‘Epidemiology of cancer of the colon and rectum’ (Cancer, xxviii, no. 1 (July 1971), 3–13), linking bowel cancer to a low-fibre diet, which made him one of the few scientists with two citation classics in unrelated fields. In collaboration with Hugh Trowell, he edited Refined carbohydrate foods and disease: some implications of dietary fibre (1975), and Western diseases (1981). He successfully promoted the importance of dietary fibre as a constituent of a healthy diet and in the prevention of disease; published Don't forget fibre in your diet (1979), which was translated into nine languages; and is largely responsible for significant changes in the diet of western society.
Acknowledged as one of the great Irish doctors of the twentieth century, Burkitt lectured throughout the world, wrote several books, and published over three hundred papers in scientific journals, revolutionising the sciences of nutrition, gastroenterology and epidemiology. He received honorary degrees, fellowships, and awards from Europe, America, and Africa, including an hon D.Sc. (East Africa; 1970) and honours from several countries: he was elected FRS (1972), created a CMG (1974), received the British Medical Association's gold medal (1978), was elected a member of the French Académie des Sciences (1990), and awarded the US Bower prize (1993); Irish honours included hon. fellowships from the RCSI (1973), RCPI (1977), and TCD (1979), and an hon. D.Sc. from the Ulster University (1989). Burkitt was president of the Christian Medical Fellowship and throughout his life participated in missionary activity; in 1979 he received the Servant of the Year award from the Christian Medical Society of the USA. A man of great humility, he gave prominence in his study not to his awards but to the text of St Paul: ‘What do you possess that was not given to you? If then you really received it all as a gift, why take credit to yourself?’
He married (1943) Olive Mary Rogers, a nurse who shared his religious convictions and commitment to working with the underprivileged in the developing world; they had three daughters. He described his marriage ‘as the greatest blessing of my life’. Burkitt died 23 March 1993 in Gloucester, England. A service of thanksgiving for his life was held 12 May 1993 at All Souls’ Church, Langham Place, London.