Who is this man Michael Bottrill?

FIONA BARBER, whose Herald reports brought the first Gisborne medical misadventure case to public notice, profiles the pathologist at the centre of the smear-misreading scandal.


Meet Michael Bernard Bottrill, a quiet-living, ailing grandfather devoted to his family, his church and the pathology he practised.

Or meet an arrogant and under-trained cytologist who did not upgrade his qualifications and laboratory standards while collecting public fees.

They are the same man - it all depends who is telling the story.

The truth, no doubt, is a confluence of good and not-so-good, of reserved widower and medical businessman.

Only Dr Bottrill truly knows the proportions of the mix and, except for prepared statements and mandatory court and inquiry appearances, he is not talking to anyone - not so far.

Nobody has been able to coax the 71-year-old retired Gisborne pathologist out into the media maelstrom he inadvertently created by misreading women's cervical smears.

Talk to people who know him and you begin to understand why.

Dr Bottrill, by all accounts, is an acutely private man. Apart from his family - he lives with one of his five adult sons, his daughter-in-law and their family - he socialises little. He collects stamps, creates patterned garments on a knitting machine and goes to church most days. Hardly the sort to grab national headlines.

But Dr Bottrill's botched smear readings have propelled the retiring family man into an unfamiliar, and sometimes hostile, public arena.

The scale of his blunders is now a matter for the Gisborne cervical cancer inquiry to decide, but some of those involved are convinced that this isolated region fell victim to a pathologist who was out-of-date and dangerous.

Despite living and practising in Gisborne for 30-odd years, Dr Bottrill remains something of an enigma, a man self-distanced from the social circles of the small provincial city.

Even his business partner of three decades, Graham Reeve, describes him as a colleague and a friend - not a close chum.

"He was certainly very loyal and supportive to his family ... He did not socialise the way many professional men do," says the bacteriologist who co-owned and worked in the laboratory.

He called Dr Bottrill "a nice man, kind, not excessively generous, but generous."

Dr Bottrill, he says, withdrew even further into his family after his wife, Margaret, died in 1984.

Mr Reeve will not countenance suggestions that Dr Bottrill has behaved arrogantly or shown signs of incompetence.

"I firmly believe - and it's obviously an opinion - that the apparent arrogance and perceived lack of feeling viewed by some of the women is in fact not really arrogance, but almost certainly due to his shyness."

And as far as Dr Bottrill's reading of slides containing cells and tissue goes, Mr Reeve says that, judging by reports coming back from doctors, he had no reason to feel concern.

Dr Bottrill's family, too, have remained steadfast. They have shied away from the media and gathered around the man painted as both victim and villain.

When Dr Bottrill tendered his sympathies to the women whose lives were affected, members of his family were in the public gallery.

And when he had finished, they, along with a lone woman, applauded.

In declining an interview with the Herald, his son Thomas revealed the only glimpse of life inside the Bottrill family in the wake of the scandal.

"It's upsetting all round," he said. "We're all very sympathetic with the people involved ... It's a tragedy all round."

Dr Bottrill, meanwhile, sometimes ventures out from his rambling home in a tree-lined street in one of Gisborne's more affluent suburbs.

One of the interests that has drawn him out - even when the media blowtorch was on him - is stamps.

"He used to come regularly to meetings," says Warren Edlin, president of the Gisborne Stamp Club. These days, members still "twist his arm" to turn up to the monthly gatherings.

"We offer him a change of company - it keeps him sane."

Mr Edlin's verdict on Dr Bottrill: "A very nice man, no worries at all."

But again, there is the distance. "We don't broach any other subjects; we stay on the subjects that are quite neutral."

And yes, Mr Edlin describes the pathologist as an acquaintance, a colleague.

A man involved in the Catholic Church, which is such a cornerstone of Dr Bottrill's life, can offer little more enlightenment.

His interests and friends?

"This is a measure of how private his life is," says the man, who does not want to be identified. "When all this has gone away, he'll still be here, still part of the parish."

Fellow Gisborne specialists contacted by the Herald were also hard pressed to name close friends or provide insights.

Dr Gabriel Martinez, a Gisborne ophthalmologist, considers Dr Bottrill an excellent pathologist, and for some time attended local doctors' continuing education meetings with him.

Although some of the city's doctors also met on a social basis, Dr Bottrill was not among them.

"I just feel it's an awful shame, and I don't really think that the whole of a man's career should be rubbished because of a bad patch, a terrible patch.

"But it's a situation where maybe he should have some support ... "

Asked if he has proffered such support, Dr Martinez replies: "I haven't given him a call; I should do."

Dr Martinez is in no doubt that his colleague will be devastated and full of remorse for what has happened.

Which leads to one of the few comments Dr Bottrill has made outside court and away from his lawyers and public relations agent.

In the wake of the court case brought by a woman whose slides he misread, he said: "Having spent most of my professional life trying to avoid this sort of thing, I was very distressed in 1995 to find out that [the woman] had developed cancer."

During the week-long trial, Dr Bottrill sat passively in the gallery, his daughter-in-law Jacqueline by his side.

And when he took the stand, there was a sense that he was somehow orbiting outside the accusations levelled at him.

Tackled on dates and facts, the man with the blue-grey pallor became distant, confused.

Asked about why he did not do more to institute safeguards in light of his failing memory, he replied: "I don't know whether I did or not."

Memory loss has always been tagged to Dr Bottrill's 1990 coronary artery bypass surgery, but his business partner, Mr Reeve, out of the blue raised the spectre of problems pre-dating the operation.

Dr Bottrill has maintained that his memory, which had been good until the surgery, deteriorated after the operation to the point where he was forced to write scores of reminder notes to himself.

Mr Reeve says he, too, wrote notes for Dr Bottrill after realising that his partner was forgetting "more than I expected might happen."

"With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder whether some of these memory lapses were occurring before the major surgery ... "

During Dr Bottrill's appearance at the Gisborne inquiry this week, there were more flashes of confusion.

But some in the gallery saw only arrogance, an inability to realise that behind the cytology slides he found so interesting were real women.

It was perhaps dollars he saw, ventured one woman.

During cross-examination, Dr Bottrill's eyes flicked around the room but never met the gaze of the lawyer asking him the questions.

Some responses were clipped, almost challenging.

No, he said, the problem was not the lack of training or continuing education. And no, it wasn't that his laboratory had not been accredited.

And if he was doing it all again, he would not make any major changes.

"I was completely unaware at the time I retired there was a problem."

But there were admissions, one of which went to the heart of the inquiry team's brief.

Asked if he accepted that there had been unacceptable under-reporting of cervical smears as a consequence of his misreading, he simply said: "Regretfully, yes."

His reasons: memory loss and possibly an attention deficit problem.

This grey man struggling for clarity bore little resemblance to the young man depicted in a snapshot attached to his application for the Royal Australasian College of Pathologists.

Dr Bottrill, who was born in London, graduated with a medical degree from the University of Birmingham in 1953.

In the mid-1950s he married Birmingham-born Margaret, who was five or six years older, and they started a family.

After several years as a house surgeon and registrar, Dr Bottrill became a trainee pathologist in the north of England. During that time, he had three months' part-time gynaecological cytology training - a stint that complainants' lawyers suggested was inadequate.

In 1961, he arrived in New Zealand and headed to Whangarei, where he was the only pathologist working north of Auckland. It was a busy time, as he moved between Dargaville, Kaitaia, Kawakawa and other outposts.

In 1963, he applied for fellowship to the Royal College of Pathologists, but he never went through with the exams. Work commitments - including coroners' autopsies - and contracting tuberculosis were reasons he offered.

About 1966, the couple, with a bigger family, moved to Gisborne, where Dr Bottrill worked at the hospital.

He started reading cervical smears in 1967, and soon after he and Mr Reeve set up Gisborne Laboratories, the business they would run for three decades.

Initially, Dr Bottrill divided his time between the hospital and his own laboratory, but in 1974 he started fulltime private practice.

In the 1999 trial that brought the matter to national attention, it was claimed that he earned around $300,000 a year from the laboratory in the 1990s.

He finally became a member of the college in 1973, after sitting an oral and two practical tests, rather than the full examination. He was one of the doctors admitted under a historic grandfather clause which gave weight to experience over formal qualifications.

In August 1984, Margaret Bottrill died of a gastro-intestinal haemorrhage and peritonitis. She had been suffering renal failure for years.

Mrs Bottrill left five sons, then aged 28, 27, 26, 20 and 19.

She also left a husband whose life would be changed by that most quiet but potentially dangerous activity - peering into a microscope.

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