Bert Cohen obituary

My uncle Bert Cohen, who has died aged 95, served for a lot more than two decades as the first Nuffield analysis professor of dental science at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. An oral pathologist of fantastic distinction, he was over all a scientist of wide-ranging interests, a guy passionate about literature and art, and a stranger to narrow specialisation whose curiosity never ever dimmed.

Right after retirement in 1983, he took a prominent position on the tumour panel at what was then the Imperial Cancer Investigation Fund (now Cancer Research United kingdom), a part reflecting his respected operate on head and neck cancers. He also chaired the board of trustees of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal School, a healthcare collection. He was appointed CBE in 1982.

Bert was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the third of 4 children of Pauline (née Soloveychik) and Morris Cohen, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His grandfather, Shmuel, had opened a wholesale grocery in downtown Johannesburg. Bert would make deliveries with his father to far-flung corners of the nascent “City of Gold”, seated on a wooden wagon pulled by six mules.

Obtaining earned a degree in dental surgery from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1942, Bert joined the South African Medical Corps and grew to become an officer. He stored a remarkable war diary, tracing his progress to Egypt and then, in the bitter Italian campaign, from Taranto to Bellagio where, beside Lake Como, his war ended.

Reaching Monte Cassino on 21 July, 1944, he wrote: “Poor Cassino, horror, wreck and desolation unbelievable, roads smashed and pitted.” He suggested that photos “be taken of this monument to mankind’s worst moments and circulated by way of every schoolroom in the planet”.

Bert dreamed of currently being a writer (when a teenager he grew to become South African correspondent of the boxing magazine The Ring), but science won out. A master’s degree in dental science from Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, finished in 1948 among standard outings to watch the Chicago Cubs, and analysis at Wits and Hammersmith hospital, led at some point to his appointment as Leverhulme analysis fellow in oral pathology at the Royal College in 1957, and his professorship there in 1960.

He was convinced, before it was stylish, that dental pathology must be primarily based on general human pathology. In the words of a former colleague, Richard Ibbetson, he was “a fantastic polymath and a great investigator”. That 1 of Bert’s investigations led to definitive findings, manufactured by means of radiological examination, on the authenticity of Holbein’s painting of King Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons – which hangs in the Royal University – suggests the assortment of his interests.

Bert was a keen golfer devoted to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St Andrews, of which he was 1 of the oldest members, and a guy of captivating warmth. For the duration of the war, close to Florence, a small bird settled on his shoulder. It remained there for 5 days. This extraordinary experience, caught in a photograph on the banking institutions of the Arno, induced Florentines to prostrate themselves, identify Bert “Captain Uccellino” (“Small Bird”) and proclaim him a saint. He was far from that, but he had about him one thing magical.

As my cousin Barbara Brown, the guardian of his last few years, remarked: “It feels as if a wonderful oak has fallen to the ground a brilliant, unusual, commanding guy has left the earth.” His beloved wife, Hazel, whom he married in 1950, survives him.

Bert Cohen obituary