Halliday, James Lorimer (d1983: medical doctor and playwright)

James Lorimer Halliday was born in Dumfries, Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland. He was educated at Dumfries Academy where he studied classics with the intention of going on to do an Arts degree. However, he entered the University of Glasgow, Scotland, to study medicine, graduating MB ChB in 1920 . After some time spent working in hospitals, a general practice in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland and as a ships surgeon, Halliday began work at Ruchill Fever Hospital, Glasgow. Here his discovery of the sugar curve in cerebrospinal fluid led to his proceeding MD with high commendation in 1925. Halliday joined the public health service in Glasgow and eventually became regional medical officer with the Department of Health for Scotland.

For much of his professional life he was engaged in assessing disabilities and investigating claims for health benefits but he applied his deductive and intuitive mind to the problems he encountered and the reasons as to why people got ill the way they did. His careful investigations and statistical appraisals confirmed his ideas on the role of social and emotional factors in physical disorders. His first paper on the theme, on psychological factors in rheumatism, was published in 1937 and was followed by a series of highly original studies into asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, disability in miners and the relations between the prevalence of psychosomatic disorder and the falling birthrate.

He depended his understanding by undergoing analytical training of both Freudian and Jungian persuasions and held a part-time appointment as a psychotherapist at the Lansdown Clinic in Glasgow. The notion that a public health administrator should also be a practising physician and that the latter should be a competent psychotherapist was to him self evident and central to his holistic view of medicine.

Halliday was a founding member of the Glasgow Psychosomatic Society and its honorary president for 25 years. His book, Mr Carlyle, My Patient (1949), a biography of a Victorian whose chronic dyspepsia Halliday investigated along psychosomatic line reflected a lifelong interest in history, literature and poetry. This also found an outlet through the writing of a number of plays which were subsequently performed locally, including The Manse in the Muddle and Dark Glass. James Halliday died in 1983.

Source: British Medical Journal Obituary, 1983