It is with great sadness that we share the news of our beloved friend and colleague Larry Day’s death on 19 July.
Larry arrived at Southampton in 1993 as a GP principal in the University Health Service. After moving to a GP practice elsewhere in the city, he joined the Faculty of Medicine as a clinical teaching fellow in 2004.
Larry was born in Cyprus and studied medicine in Edinburgh, qualifying in 1981. Prior to general practice, he was a registrar and Wolfson Foundation clinical research fellow in histopathology at the University of Bristol.
He was an excellent, kind, and much-respected clinician and an inspirational, courageous, witty, and compassionate educator. Larry used his long-standing lived experience of bipolar affective disorder to address stigma associated with mental health problems and to encourage clinicians, colleagues, and medical students to reflect critically upon their own assumptions, attitudes, and behaviour.
Larry fostered the use of insights from the arts and humanities to inform clinical practice and was instrumental in establishing the medical humanities student-selected unit in the medical curriculum. His interest in the medical humanities and commitment to challenge taboos surrounding mental health issues came together while helping to plan and promote the ‘Music on the Mind’ concert composed by Professor Harvey Brough and performed by the Southampton University choir in 2016.
Larry’s passionate advocacy for and allyship with disadvantaged and marginalised people was evident in his teaching. For more than ten years Larry developed and led a novel and transformative third-year optional course titled ‘A Journey Working with Diversity’ which encouraged personal growth and change by exploring oppression and prejudice. His lectures on the wounded healer encouraged empathy for others as well as oneself. He was also the lead and deputy lead for the diversity theme within the Faculty and he supervised and co-published student projects on refugees, decolonising the medical curriculum and student experiences of vulnerability.
Larry had a fierce intelligence. He was a brilliant mentor and role model who was generous, caring and incredibly supportive. He always had time to talk and listen. He made us think and laugh a lot and we will miss him terribly.
