Bryan Ausin McSwiney 1894-1947

Abstract

Bryan Austin McSwiney was born in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., on 20 May 1894. His father was William Francis McSwiney, originally of Dublin, who had emigrated to the United States in 1890. He spent most of his childhood in the States and in 1907 he was sent to Ireland to finish his education. He entered Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, and stayed there until he was sixteen. He is remembered there, in the words of the school magazine, as a ‘cheery American boy . . . and the possessor of a deadly base-ball shy which was absolutely devastating on the cricket field’. In later years he had less opportunity to demonstrate his prowess in this direction, but some of it persisted in his service at tennis which remained sufficiently devastating until his activity in this direction was cut short by a ruptured tendon of the gastrocnemius. After leaving school he spent a year of study in Germany, a short time in the United States, and in 1912 returned to Ireland to continue his education at Trinity College, Dublin. His final choice of medicine seems to have been largely accidental. Some distant relatives had been medical men, notably a second cousin who as ship’s medical officer lost his life in the Titanic disaster, but there was no particular medical tradition in his family. His original intention had, in fact, been to study law, but, when discussing the financial difficulties of pursuing this course, he was advised by a shipboard acquaintance to try his hand at medicine. This advice he fortunately took and clearly found to his liking for he soon distinguished himself, being awarded the Reuben Harvey Memorial prize for an essay on creatine and creatinine. The essay appeared in print in 1915 in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science and constitutes his first published paper.