Anton Sebastian FRCP was a consultant physician, author, historian, philosopher, philanthropist and social activist. He had an international profile, practising and lecturing in many countries, and his major work, A Dictionary of the History of Medicine won a BMA Medical Book Award.
Anton came from a family of physicians. Born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka and raised in Kandy, he attended the Catholic high school St Sylvester College. He was trained as a doctor at Peradeniya Medical School, University of Ceylon and graduated in 1972. After his training he focused on general medical practice, followed by specialty training in several UK hospitals, including Charing Cross Hospital and Kingston Hospital. After obtaining postgraduate qualifications, he worked as a visiting consultant to several hospitals in the UK and other countries including Sri Lanka, and in the Middle East he was a physician to the Royal Family in Saudi Arabia.
As a physician, he was knowledgeable, skilled, dedicated, compassionate and committed. He visited many hospitals and clinics in USA and other countries, sharing his clinical experience and academic wisdom with many medical experts. Since graduation his many interests included the history of medicine, science, and technology. Over 45 years, he collected over 5,000 books and thousands of articles. He authored many books, including A Dictionary of the History of Medicine, Dates in Medicine and A Dictionary of the History of Science.
A Dictionary of the History of Medicine (1999) was his major work, a unique and extensively illustrated dictionary of terms, people, events and dates spanning the entire history of medicine, and which won a BMA Medical Book Award. Anton had surveyed 3,000 antiquarian books plus 2,000 volumes to produce 10,000 entries. It is considered a monumental work, with a large number of illustrations from many sources, compiled over many years and from more than 5,000 books and many hundreds of medical journals. It is a major source of vital and detailed medical information relating to the founding fathers of various medical fields, nursing, research experts, instruments, conditions, procedures, and dates.
The book Dictionary of the History of Science (2001) focused on the history of applied sciences – it has approximately 3,000 detailed and extensively researched entries offering special value to scientists, doctors, nurses, therapists working in health sciences, and students. It provides authoritative information about notable scientific figures, inventions, terms and dates, captivating anecdotes and background material. The entries include each term's Greek and Latin origins and concise biography. It is a monumental work of scholarship using many original sources.
His book A Complete Illustrated History of Sri Lanka was very popular. He wrote this book after writing the books on the history of medicine, dates in medicine, and the history of science. This book took 6 years of intensive research – it is a hybrid of academic and popular history while preserving the best of both disciplines. This book starts with the geological formation of the land, and continues with the prehistoric and historic events up to now. He analysed myths, legends, prehistory, chronicles and inscriptions, geology, pathology, archeology and other allied sciences. He travelled to the remotest parts of the island and met many Buddhist monks and spent days and nights in Buddhist monasteries. With the help of Buddhist monks, he was able to translate inscriptions that were written on palm leaves in the Pali language. It took approximately 10 years of hard work.
According to him: ‘While studying Sri Lankan history, I realised it was wanting in so many aspects, in that you have to look at Sri Lanka not in isolation but how people from ancient times looked at our country. As a result, I have taken Sri Lanka out of an isolated perspective and into a global context.’ According to him the major feature of the book was its timeline. He declared: ‘I constructed the timeline, which compared the events in the island to the rest of the world for instance. It was fascinating to know that king Gajabahu ruled in the second century AD, the Greek philosopher Ptolemy already put Lanka on the map to a fair detail.’
He was knowledgeable with ancient Buddhist medical practices in Sri Lanka that were based on compassion, cleanliness, and meditation. He considered Lord Buddha to be the first psychotherapist and psychologist who practiced and taught an advanced form of meditation (Vipassana), that in the West is referred to as ‘mindfulness meditation’ by Harvard professors.
Anton was a bibliophile and was interested in traditional medicine from various regions of the world, acquiring an enormous collection of books related to traditional medical practices from various cultures, namely Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Islamic, European, Indian Chinese, and American Indian traditions.
He travelled all over the world giving lectures and presentations. He gave a talk to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, New Delhi, India in 2012, and another to the Millennium Oration of the Sri Lanka Medical Association of North America in 2012. He also gave a talk to the Peradeniya Medical School Alumni Association of the United Kingdom (PEMSAA) in Las Vegas in 1995 on the history of medicine and the importance of current medical ethical practices. He was interested in other areas of medicine, such as ethics and patient-centred compassionate care, lifestyle medicine, integrated medicine and medical ethics. He was known for doing charity work in Sri Lanka and other developing countries. In addition to history, he had other interests in arts, philosophy, social sciences and human rights.
Anton continued his clinical practice and died at the age of 75 after contracting COVID-19. He died on April 4 2020 in Kingston Hospital. As well as being an excellent clinician, Anton Sebastian was a historian, humanist, philosopher, archeologist, polymath and a universalist.
Duraiyah Thangathurai
[This obituary originally appeared in the Royal College of Physicians’ In tribute: Remembering RCP members and fellows who died from COVID-19]