Dr Richard Irving Bodman

Personal Details

Dr Richard Irving Bodman MB ChB FFARCS DA FRCP

07/02/1919 to 13/12/2010

Place of birth: Bristol, England

Nationality:    British

CRN:  493929

Education and qualifications

General education	Initial schooling in Angola. Medical School, University of Bristol
Primary medical qualification(s)	MB ChB University of Bristol 1944
Initial Fellowship and type	FFARCS by Election
Year of Fellowship	1953
Other qualification(s)	DA (RCP&S), 1945 FRCP(C), 1977

Professional life and career

Postgraduate career

On qualifying Bodman was resident Medical Officer at Bristol Homoeopathic Hospital, then Casualty Officer at Bristol General Hospital, followed by junior resident anaesthetist at the Royal Infirmary, Bristol. From 1945 to 1947 he served in the RAMC and also worked as anaesthetist for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan. From 1948 he rose in the RAMC to T/Major, designated Specialist Anaesthetist. On demobilisation he was appointed Senior Registrar at St Thomas’ Hospital, London and next he was Lecturer in Anaesthesia at the University of Bristol. In 1952 he was appointed Consultant Anaesthetist at Hillingdon Co. Hospital, Uxbridge. His consultant sessions extended in 1954 to St Peter’s, St Paul’s and St Philip’s Hospitals in London, remaining in this post until his retirement in 1968.                                              

He then worked as a general practitioner in Co. Waterford, Ireland before beginning a second academic career, starting with his appointment in 1971 as Professor of Anaesthesia at Amadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. By 1977 he moved to the Department of Anaesthesia, St John’s General Hospital in Newfoundland, Canada. By 1985 he moved to the Department of Anesthesiology at King Faisal University and King Fahd Hospital, Al-Khobar in Saudi Arabia, working there until his final retirement.

Professional interests and activities

Through his career Bodman published on a broad range of anaesthetic topics including thiopentone, muscle relaxants, nalorphine, intensive care and hypotensive anaesthesia. As a Major in the British Army Emergency Reserve, he was mobilised to a Field Surgical Team at Port Said during the Suez crisis of 1956. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and served on the Council of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland 1962-65. He had a strong interest in anaesthesia for prostatectomy and by 1968 was a Research Fellow of the Institute of Urology, London. 

Other biographical information

As his father was a medical missionary in Angola, he was raised there and learned to speak Portuguese. He married and had children, living in the London area in the 1950s. On final retirement about 1986, he settled in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he developed his interest in the history of anaesthesia; he presented  papers at the 2nd International Symposium on this in London in 1987 and at the 3rd in Atlanta in 1992. After taking a fellowship to study at the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology in Chicago, he produced with Deidre Gillies a biography of Harold Griffith (1992). By 1997 he moved to Cork, Ireland. He presented papers at meetings of the History of Anaesthesia Society up to 2002. Although wheelchair-bound in his last years, he remained independent until his death at the age of 91, predeceased by his wife Veronica, but survived by three children and nine grandchildren.   

Author and sources

Author:

Dr Alistair McKenzie

Sources and comments:

[1] Freeman G. Obituary Richard Irving Bodman (with photograph). BMJ 2011; 343: d4579. [2] Medical Register 1945 and Medical Directories 1951-70. [3] Publications listed in PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ [4] Bodman R, Gillies D. Harold Griffith – The Evolution of Modern Anaesthesia. Toronto: Hannah Institute and Dundurn Press, 1992.