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Alexis Brook, the good doctor

I must have known Alexis for at least 50 years. I can’t remember the exact date that I first met him, but I certainly met him at some of the annual summer parties my parents used to hold in their garden in Putney for the professional staff of the Cassel Hospital, where my father Tom Main was Medical Director for many years. Alexis worked at the Hospital for 15 years from 1956 to 1971, first as a SHMO, then as a consultant, so I would have been a medical student when we first met. I can certainly remember my father’s enthusiasm and admiration for this young doctor, and my own impression of him, which was of a quietly warm and calm person, who was prepared to talk to and show interest in a young and anxious medical student like myself, rather in awe of ‘real doctors’. As my own career through medicine developed and I became by turns a general practitioner, a clinical assistant in obstetrics, a part-time child welfare doctor, a family planning specialist and eventually a psychoanalyst, I met Alexis many times during the following years at social occasions both at the Cassel and later when my husband, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, worked at the Child Guidance Training Centre at the Tavistock where so much of Alexis’s career was spent. His welcoming smile, personal warmth and continuing interest always made me feel that I was a friend. During these years his family was growing, and then a bit later so was mine, and he always asked what my daughter Becky was doing and he told me about his own children. It was much later, when I was on the Board and Council of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and I was asked to become involved with activities funded by a bequest known as the ‘Inman Fund’, to do with psychosomatic ophthalmology that I actually met with Alexis as a colleague myself, and learned that all my impressions of his thoughtfulness and calm confidence were correct; and were accompanied by his remarkable capacity to assess situations simultaneously on several levels; and also that his penetrating intelligence was used with great generosity and humanity. Typical of Alexis might be a situation in which a committee or working group would be discussing a project or difficulty and trying to puzzle out a solution, a plan of action, a way forward; a situation when each person might have a different point of view, or an axe to grind. After a while, when perhaps the meeting had somewhat lost its way, or reached a seeming dead-end, Alexis’s quiet, firm voice would bring us back to our basic task, offer some thoughts, never giving instruction, but calmly casting