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Headlines 7 “Barry as a person was a man of great intelligence and knowledge. He ran a world-class day-to-day neurophysiology laboratory with scientific rigour and attention to detail. The practice of never letting the sun set on an incomplete report has remained part of the work ethic with which some of us have persevered… Barry was a mentor to many of us and for me in particular was the person who encouraged me into a lifelong practice in Clinical Neurophysiology,” – Neurologist Dr Richard Frith During the year Cant studied the effects of adrenaline on neuromuscular transmission in frogs, and it was where he became interested in computing and the application of information theory to the central nervous system, which led to his interested in evoked potentials. The study of evoked potentials were controversial and unproven when Dr Cant became involved in them. Prior to establishing the lab at Auckland Hospital, Cant practised under two world famous clinical neurophysiologists at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, Reg Bickford and Ed Lambert. Bickford famously proved evoked potentials were cerebral in origin by recording his own after administering ketamine to himself. One of Dr Cant’s first tasks when he joined the clinic was to record the evoked potentials while Bickford lay unconscious and ventilated in an electrically screened room. Cant established evoked potentials as a clinical test and as a means of clinical investigation at Auckland Hospital. In a pioneering study funded by the Medical Research Council, Dr Cant, along with Dr Ann Hume and Nigel Shaw, demonstrated that evoked potentials could be used as an indicator of the severity of brain damage. The results were published in the Annals of Neurology and in other journals, plus adopted in many centres throughout the world. Cant and Shaw were also the first to demonstrate the effect of age on visual evoked potentials, and showed that sub-clinical seizures were a commonplace occurrence following a head injury, which wasn’t well-known at the time. Sleep EEG recordings were introduced for the first time in Australasia under Cant’s leadership. For a time the neurophysiology department ran a clinical service for the diagnosis of sleep apnoea. In the early 1980’s, Cant and a neurology registrar, Dr Richard Frith, were the first in New Zealand to use overnight sleep studies to diagnose sleep apnoea at a time when it was not widely recognised. Further observations by Frith and Cant indicated that obstructive sleep apnoea was quite common in New Zealand, especially among obese people. Today, advances in imaging have largely superseded the clinical use of evoked potentials, but Cant’s methods continue to be used in the evaluation of traumatic brain injury. Cant moved to Sydney in the 1980s, where he practised as a neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist until he retired. Cant’s department at Auckland Hospital played an important role in postgraduate education in clinical neurophysiology. Neurology trainees, neurologists and non-medical neurophysiologists from throughout New Zealand and Australia received training there. In addition to his hospital work Barry provided many years of service to the Neurological Foundation, including a long period as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) from 1978 to 1983. Very few grants were made before 1978, but during the time Cant was Chair there was a rapid escalation in the number and size of the grants. Prior to joining the SAC, Cant was one of the first recipients of a research grant from the Neurological Foundation in 1975. He was a strong supporter of the New Zealand Epilepsy Association and an advocate for people with epilepsy. Along with Philip Wrightson he established the epilepsy surgical programme at Auckland Hospital. He and Dr Jon Simcock travelled the country on multiple weekends with an epilepsy roadshow for GPs at a time when this sort of education was novel and unique. Dr Cant sadly passed away last year aged 86.