Professor Tom Arie - The Jewish Chronicle

For two decades Professor Tom Arie, who has died aged 86, was England’s leading geriatric psychiatrist, dedicating his working life to advocacy for older people and for mental health. Felix Post, a fellow refugee from Nazi Europe, introduced him at London’s Maudsley Hospital to old age psychiatry, a branch of medicine which Post had pioneered in the UK.

“The elderly were stigmatised”, Arie recalled in 2008. “I went into this field saying – ‘Must it be so? Or can it be very different?’”

In 1969 he became a consultant psychiatrist at Goodmayes Hospital Essex, and in 1977 he was appointed Professor of Health Care of the Elderly at Nottingham University. This was the first appointment of a psychogeriatrician as a professor in the UK. The courses he established there for psychogeriatric services were modelled around the world.

He also became a staunch advocate for women doctors to achieve consultant posts. In everything he did, he was an enthusiast, campaigning on behalf of his patients, and ensuring that the new discipline of old age psychiatry became acknowledged and recognised.

He was trained in social medicine by another Jewish doctor, Jerry Morris, the first to act on the link between exercise and health. Arie kept in touch with him and established and maintained friendships with intellectuals and academics in a wide range of disciplines. He truly spanned the “two cultures” of science and the humanities to a remarkable degree.

He was born Tomas Arje in Prague in 1933 to Otto, a lawyer and Hedy Glaser, a language teacher. His grandfather Samuel Arje was a rabbi in Dobris. Tom carried memories throughout his life of the Nazi discrimination they faced in 1939, and of seeing with his own eyes the destruction of his grandfather’s synagogue. He and his parents escaped to England on the penultimate train in August, 1939. They settled in Reading, where his father obtained work first with the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, and later both his parents monitored Nazi broadcasts for the BBC.

His family is still remembered at Reading Synagogue, which Otto represented at the Board of Deputies, and where Arie celebrated his bar mitzvah and attended youth clubs. He was educated at Reading School and Balliol College, Oxford where he began by reading classics before swapping to medicine. He managed to combine both in his first published article Pythagoras and Beans in which he explored the legend that the ancient mathematician did not eat beans, and connected it to a bean allergy.

During his working life Arie was reticent about his Jewish background and very few of his colleagues were aware of what had become his very private side. He spoke English without any trace of an accent. But in retirement he was able to explore his family heritage, and would frequently return to Prague with his wife Eleanor Aitken, enjoying the café culture and the Jewish historical sites, as well as visiting and caring for family graves.

Arie had an exceptionally warm and welcoming personality. In his rambling Norfolk home he stored his huge archive, leaving his descendants the memories of an inspiring personality who enriched many lives. He is survived by Eleonor, their three children and six grandchildren.

RABBI DR MICHAEL HILTON

Professor Tom Arie: born August 9,1933. Died May 24, 2020