‘I was in prison there’ was Ernest Jellinek’s conversation-stopping contribution, as we were talking about the Isle of Man. And indeed he had been, although for only a few months.
Ernest was a distinguished Edinburgh neurologist. He was born in pre-war Vienna, the son of Stefan Jellinek, a goatherd who had progressed through scholarships to become a professor of electrical pathology and a friend of Sigmund Freud, and Emilie Jellinek née Wertheimer. He was brought up a Catholic and received a good education in the classics but, having Jewish ancestry, his family was forced to move to friends in Oxford as Hitler achieved power.
He continued his education until, on his 18th birthday, the local policemen arrived at his boarding school on a bicycle and arrested him as an enemy alien. He was taken for detention to the internment camp in Douglas on the Isle of Man. With his classical education and linguistic abilities, he enjoyed the atmosphere of this prison-university, but shortly he got the opportunity of release by joining the British Army. The Pioneer Corps proved tedious, but he was selected for a commission and, after a short time at Sandhurst, found himself pursuing the Germans to the Rhine, in command of a troop of armoured cars. His service was cut short by an anti-tank bullet, which took away part of his face. He came to in an American field hospital and was transferred to St Hugh’s Hospital in Oxford, which specialised in treating head injuries. Here he became interested in neurology.
After some months of rehabilitation, in October 1945 he took up the place he had won before the war to study medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, graduating with a BA in physiology and, after training at the Radcliffe Infirmary, gaining his BM BCh in 1952. He obtained his MRCP and his DM (on the neurological manifestations of myxoedema) during junior posts in Oxford, Reading and London. At Churchill Hospital he was influenced by Ritchie Russell and trained in neurology at the Maida Vale Hospital, where he met his wife, Ruth (née Macgregor).
He was appointed as a consultant neurologist at Mount Vernon Hospital in 1962, but moved in 1966 to Edinburgh as a consultant and senior lecturer in the Northern Group of Hospitals. There he was to spend the rest of his career at the centre of a very busy neurology and neurosurgical service to the southeast of Scotland, with a special interest in multiple sclerosis, retiring finally from clinical practice in 2003.
He taught and published widely on clinical topics and became a committee member of the Association of British Neurologists, representing his specialty on both national and European committees. His special interest was in clinical standards, something that was apparent to those of us who sought his opinion on complex problems and witnessed his meticulous and courteous approach to his patients.
Ernest was cultured, energetic, multilingual and had a love for travel. He had a long and fruitful retirement, participating in the activities of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and its senior fellows’ club, regularly attending lectures and hill walks. He read widely and published many carefully researched papers on biographical and historical themes. These drew upon his knowledge of literature, languages and neurology and ranged from essays on Gibbon and Heine, Valsalva and Bowdler, to observations on suicide in literature and the history of cremation.
To non-medical friends he was the perfect British gentleman, and to his colleagues he was the doctors’ doctor, ever courteous and helpful. He died, aged 97, as had his father, mentally alert but hindered latterly by increasing deafness and mobility problems. Predeceased by his wife in 2009, he was survived by his children, Diana, a retired community paediatrician, and David, a neurosurgeon, and six grandchildren, Stefan, Oscar, Helen, Alistair, Robert and Anna.
