Doctor Maurice O'Connor Drury, Wittgenstein's pupil

Abstract

Doctor Maurice O'Connor Drury worked for most of his life in Saint Patrick's Hospital, Dublin. While going about his routine clinical work at that hospital, Doctor Drury quietly maintained a close, lifelong friendship with the man regarded as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein.Few realised that before studying medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, ‘Con’ Drury had read philosophy at Cambridge, where he came into close contact with some of the great minds of philosophy this century; Bertrand Russell, George Moore and Gilbert Ryle.Con Drury is importan t not just because of his own philosophical work but because, through his enduring friendship with the deeply troubled philosopher, he challenged the portraye d image of Wittgenstein as a ‘cantankerous, arrogant and tormented genius’.