Dally, Ann 1926-2007 (Ann Gwendolen Dally, Ann Mullins)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born March 29, 1926, in London, England; died March 24, 2007. Physician and author. Dally was best known for her controversial ideas about rehabilitating drug addicts with serious, long-term drug abuse histories. An obstetrician by training, she did her undergraduate work at Somerville College, where she also completed an M.A. in 1950. She earned her M.B. and B.S. in 1953 at St. Thomas's Medical School, also obtaining a D.Obst. degree there in 1955. Her M.D. from the Welleve Institute came much later, in 1993. During the mid-1950s, she was a surgeon in obstetrics and gynecology at St. James's Hospital, then a research fellow for the Wandsworth Hospital Group. She became interested in psychiatry because of her first husband, who was a psychiatrist. Together, they opened their own clinic and became increasingly involved in treating people who had longstanding addictions to opiates. The philosophy among medical practitioners at the time was to treat addicts by quickly reducing the number of drugs they were taking. This was a viable treatment for those who had not been addicted very long, but more hardcore users usually relapsed and were abandoned by drug dependency units who considered them hopeless. Dally's idea was to wean such addicts off drugs much more slowly, but this got her into trouble with colleagues, who saw her as supplying her patients with illicit drugs for far too long. She also came under scrutiny for treating her patients' psychological problems when she did not herself have a degree in psychiatry. For many years, however, Dally made her mark in the field, and she was even drugs treatment adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In 1984, furthermore, she was on a committee that wrote the government's Guidelines on Treatment of Drug Misuse. Increasingly frustrated by the status quo in the medical community and its ineffective treatment of the drug crisis, Dally eventually ran afoul of Britain's General Medical Council, which revoked her license to prescribe drugs. She wrote about her professional battles in the autobiography A Doctor's Story (1990). Named a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dally was also the author of several other titles, including A-Z of Babies (1961), Mothers: Their Power and Influence (1976), Women under the Knife: A History of Surgery (1991), and Fantasy Surgery (1996).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dally, Ann, A Doctor's Story, Macmillan, 1990.

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), April 4, 2007, p. 64.