Owen Lyndon Wade

Modern paperback

From 1948 to 1978 the BNF was a dull, hardback publication that explained how to make old fashioned and largely ineffective remedies. It was published about every three years and used many Latin terms and 19th century measures. In 1978 Owen became chairman of the formulary committee. He led the team that by 1981 had transformed the BNF into its modern, paperback format, published every six months and used by thousands of doctors in the UK and in many other countries around the world.

Owen’s career in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics started in 1957, aged 36. After only five months as a senior lecturer and with no specific training, he persuaded Belfast to offer him a chair in clinical pharmacology. The department had one senior technician but no other staff, and Owen’s clinical work started with access to a few beds on the medical professors’ ward. Owen was trained at Cambridge and University College London and had become an experienced clinician and competent researcher in chest and heart medicine.

Owen set about devising a course, putting together a lecture programme, and planning practical classes, having never done anything like this before. He gave all the lectures and ran all the practical classes. He soon complemented the lectures with interactive road shows, discussing the management of specific patients with a panel of students while the rest of the class listened, learnt, and joined in. These were clinically relevant and became popular. In the early years Owen’s clinical work prospered, and he became the first consultant to have beds in both teaching hospitals in Belfast.

By 1961 it had become clear that taking thalidomide in pregnancy caused severe and often fatal abnormalities in the fetus. Many babies were born with no arms and no legs (phocomelia). He tried to find out how much thalidomide had been prescribed in Northern Ireland and by whom. This proved impossible, but he was able prospectively to quantify all the drugs prescribed by each general practitioner in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, Owen worked with colleagues to obtain comparable data for Norway, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and West Germany.

He made innovative application of the computer based system used to pay pharmacists in Northern Ireland to produce numerical data on drug use. This fed his interest in adverse drug reactions, and he wrote some of the earliest papers and books on this subject.

The nation was horrified by the thalidomide disaster. At that time there was no legal framework for assessing new drugs; no system for monitoring the safety of drugs already on the market, and no means to communicate rapidly with prescribers about safety concerns. In 1963 the government set up the Committee on Safety of Drugs. Owen was a founding member and subsequently went on to chair the Committee of Review of Medicines and the adverse drugs reaction subcommittee, and he became a member of the Medicines Commission, which set up and oversaw the regulatory committee structure.

A smallpox problem

Owen was dean of Birmingham Medical School from 1978 to 1984. By midday on the day his deanship started, 1 September, he had had to shut half the medical school and his professor of virology had cut his own throat and was dying. The problem was smallpox. Some research was being undertaken in the medical school, and a photographer in the anatomy department had become ill in August. She was diagnosed as having smallpox on the 24th and died from the disease soon after—the last person in the world to do so.

Trade union power in 1978 was at its peak and the Association of Scientific, Technical, and Managerial Staffs made life difficult. However, Owen took command, learnt all about smallpox, took expert advice, kept the relevant documents in good order, and looked after his staff, who gave him much support. The medical school was battered but unbowed and lived to fight another day. Four of his professors in Birmingham became presidents of their respective royal colleges.

Owen Wade achieved a great deal. He ascribed this to being cheerful and optimistic, his capacity to get on well with colleagues, his ability to sleep well, his wife, and a strong stomach.

He leaves his wife, Margaret, and three daughters.