John Brock-Utne
Stanford, California, United States

Davy Torrens was born in Northern Ireland in 1897 near Coleraine. His parents were farmers of Scottish stock. From the age of ten, he was seen to be a wizard in fixing all the wall clocks in the surrounding areas.
Torrens did very well in school and won a scholarship to the Albert Agricultural College, Glasnevin in Dublin. He went there against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to stay at home and work on the farm.
He went on to further studies in the College of Science in Dublin, where he was awarded a gold medal. In 1916, Torrens got an assistant laboratory job in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He saw the Easter Rising in Dublin, but from inside the TCD wall. The job in TCD helped pay his way, because he received very little assistance from home.
It was during his work in the physiology laboratory that someone thought he should be supported to get a medical degree. In 1936, he completed his studies and internship and promptly was hired as an assistant professor in physiology. A few years later, he was made a full professor and became the dean of the medical school, a post he held until 1967. His health obliged him to retire.
When his past students found out that he was retiring, a party was arranged in the dining room in TCD, which I attended. It was packed, and at least 100 former students stood in the foyer. The school collected money for Torrens as a parting gift. Funds came in from all over the world. The money collected was substantial and covered more than the expense of the new house in Coleraine that he had built. Sadly, he passed on shortly after moving there.
We, as students, knew about his love of horology, the study of time and timekeeping instruments. Every summer he was invited to Europe and especially Switzerland to repair and discuss clocks. Some would say that his love of horology was greater than his love of physiology.
I first met Professor Davy Smyth Torrens in September 1962. He was a smallish man with large glasses and even larger ears. My poor English did not escape his attention, but he welcomed me and wished me good luck with my premed studies. I was terrified.
It was during an inorganic chemistry lecture by Dr. Roy Brown that I understood Torrens’ power as dean.
A premed student had managed to get a slide of a naked lady into Dr. Brown’s slide deck on inorganic chemistry. When this picture appeared in the lecture, it produced a gasp from the audience. Dr. Brown quickly move on to the next slide. He stopped lecturing and looked around the large lecture hall which held about 140 students and said sternly, “Who did that?”
A silence fell over the room. He waited a few minutes. No one said anything. With that he walked out of the hall. We all sat quietly. Nobody dared to move. A few minutes later he came back: “I have been informed by Dean Torrens that if the person who placed the inappropriate slide in my slide deck does not own up within ten minutes after the lecture is concluded, there will be no more chemistry lectures to this premed class for this term.”
I remember sitting and thinking, “Wow, this guy Torrens does not mess around.”
After the culprit had identified himself, he was summarily sent to Torrens. He was dismissed that morning from the premed class and Trinity. That made an impression.
We were all invited throughout our time in TCD for a chat with Torrens in his rooms in New Square. In my case, I came to see him first in the spring of 1963. He asked me how I was settling in and if I found the course taxing. I told him that I was working very hard. He looked at me and said, “Attend all lectures, thereby play the man behind the board.”
I did, and it proved to be one of the best pieces of advice I ever got.

The premed examinations in June 1963 were exhausting. We had exams morning and afternoon for three and a half days. When I later mentioned the ordeal to the administrative staff in the Dean’s office, I was told, “Professor Torrens believes that this will weed out the people who do not work.”
That was certainly true as only 35% scraped through.
Torrens took an interest in all his students and showed much empathy. Arriving back in Norway in early July 1963, following the premed year, my mother rightly made me write and thank the various teachers. Professor Torrens was the only one who wrote back.
Torrens was a legend in his own time. We were all terrified of him as it was rumored that he was a very hard examiner. What was disconcerting to me was that he always had a smile on his face, especially when he listened to our answers to his questions. Was he happy with our reply or just amused by our stupid responses?
The smile was even bigger when we worked in the physiology laboratory. Here he would observe us struggling, as we fought to get the smoke drum to record, for example, a frog’s sciatic nerve action potential. The smoke drum was called a kymograph. It consisting of a revolving drum, bearing a record sheet (usually of smoked paper) on which a stylus moved up and down displaying the effects of, for example, the effect of drugs on contractile tissues. The kymograph was commonly used in experimental physiology and pharmacology laboratories in teaching institutions at that time. Nowadays, these are conspicuous by their absence.
Torrens would whistle a timeless tune as he wandered slowly around the laboratory with his hands clasped behind his back. He would look as if he was not observing, but he was. He would frequently be seen tugging at his right ear lobe. We never found out what that meant. Were we doing something wrong? I remember literally shaking in my shoes and keeping my head firmly down as I sensed his approach to my workspace. He was a wizard at all this smoke drum and frog stuff. But then, he had been working with these things for forty-six years when we started.
In the winter of 1965, living in rooms in Botany Bay, I became ill with an irregular heartbeat. Davy Torrens came and brought me supper. It was a large bowl of soup containing his special “get better” concoction. It tasted delicious and knocked me out like a light. I felt much better the next morning. He came back again that evening and gave me another “knock out soup.” Returning the next night with the same soup in hand, and seeing I was better, he took the soup home with him.
I was not the only student in “rooms” whom he attended. Any student who got sick while living in “rooms” was visited by Davy Torrens. In those days, Trinity had no on-site college doctor.
When he chose to deploy it, which was rarely, Torrens revealed a sharp sense of humor. I saw it once in the spring of 1965. It was known that I had started to date a certain Miss Sue Sheppard (who later agreed to become my wife). I was coming down the steps from the dining hall and met Professor Torrens. I greeted him, “Good afternoon, Professor Torrens.”
He looked at me and, I think with a small smile, said, “You had a good lunch? I presume it could only have been a Sheppard’s pie.”
One question he asked, in a pulmonary physiology tutorial, I have posed to medical students and residents over many years on six continents: “What is the purpose of the residual volume in the lung?”
Today, I have still to wait to get the right answer, but it is so simple.
As Torrens would say: “Without it, we would be pink and blue ten to twelve times a minute.” (As an explanation: this is a normal respiration rate.)
Thank you, Professor David Smyth Torrens, for your physiology pearls, your empathy, and your immense contribution to our education and Trinity College.
JOHN G. BROCK-UTNE, MA, MB, BCh, (TCD), MD, PhD (Bergen), FCMSA, is an Emeritus Professor of Anesthesiology at Stanford University in California. He has published several hundred articles dealing with both clinical and laboratory anesthetic research and seven medical textbooks. He is also the editor of two books entitled The Medics of TCD in the 1960s.
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