Professor Patrick Tracey

Well, I suppose...

I knew Michael probably better than most of the people who are talking for many years.

Michael came to us probably on seven or eight occasions and he was going to come to us actually a few days.

He died a few days before he was brought back to us.

I'll say as well, Ciarán, in discussing him, I'm going to keep my comments to matters that are already in the public domain, obviously, or the general medical knowledge.

As a doctor, patient confidentiality will have to remain paramount, no matter who the patient is.

Okay, so let's first start with his vitiligo.

When Michael came to us originally, I had him in another room.

He was on his own, and he took down a book of clinical dermatology, Diverves, and he sort of opened a page with an African child with vitiligo, and he just came up to me with the book.

It's a big, big book, maybe 600 or 700 pages, and he says, Patrick, nobody understands how much pain that child is in.

And I was on the thing to Raymond being in New York at the time.

And I said, what do you mean, Michael?

There's no pain from vitiligo.

And then he took down his trousers and he showed me that he was totally, I suppose, black and white.

And we were treating some part of it.

Now, his vitiligo was that extensive that medically...

I suppose achieving uniformity rather than preserving the original pigmentation is what we tend to do, being psychologically supportive.

And it's very difficult for him because

of the fact that he was in the public eye for so long and Arnie Klein, who's dead since, you know, sort of had been treating it.

But we took over, I suppose, treatment of that at that stage.