Thomas Forrest Main (25 February 1911-20 May 1990)

‘Without the Cassel Hospital and the Tavistock Clinic there would be no psychoanalytical psychotherapy in the National Health Service today.’ —

Tom Main died at his home in Barnes on 29 May 1990, aged 79, without knowing the fate of the Cassel Hospital, the therapeutic community which as its Medical Director he began to develop in 1946, which he took into the National Health Service in good faith in 1948, and from which he retired in 1976. During his final illness, despite increasing weakness and in full knowledge of his prognosis, he had written for and encouraged the campaign to save the Hospital. Sadly, the news of its reprieve arrived only on the day of his funeral.

Mercifully he was free of pain until shortly before the end, and had time to review his achievements, to assess his own contribution, and to share his pride and his grief at the approach of death with his family, friends and colleagues. As his daughter I was grateful that we had been able to complete the work on the collection of papers published (The Ailment and other Psychoanalytic Essays, Free Association Books, 1989) shortly before his death, and that the book had been suitably launched and celebrated.

From a relatively impoverished background — the family had given up a comfortable life in South Africa and returned to Tyneside at the outbreak of the First World War — Tom Main was an outstanding scholar at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, winning scholarships there and to the Medical College of the University of Durham. His interests were in Science and in English, though all his school prizes were taken in the form of books of music — another passion. He played rugby for his school and for Durham Medicals, and enjoyed physical activity all his life, playing squash well into his fifties. Deeply influenced while a student and young doctor by James Spence, the paediatrician who first realised that babies survived in hospital more frequently if accompanied by their mothers