Deirdre O’Connor Solomon, a physician with a master’s degree in public health who cared for those in challenging straits, from emergency patients to migrant farm workers to addicts seeking recovery, died Monday in her West Toledo residence. She was 89.

She had cancer and was under hospice care, said her husband, Donald Solomon.

She was licensed to practice medicine as Deirdre Mary O’Connor and, though she retired in 1994 from what is now ProMedica Flower Hospital in Sylvania, she kept her license in force until April, 2008.

“Being a doctor was important to her,” Mr. Solomon said.

She also enjoyed talking about medicine and science, said her daughter, Deidre Ann O’Connor, and in word and deed, showed her concern for social justice.

“She was always learning everything. She was inquisitive,” said Ms. O’Connor, a former registered environmental health specialist in Marlborough, Mass. “Her values were very obviously stated and in everything she did. You knew where she stood.”

Peter Silverman, whose late mother, Inez, and Dr. O’Connor became best friends, said: “She was very smart and well read – literature, newspapers, opinion magazines.”

Dr. O’Connor in 1978 became head of Flower’s chemical dependency unit and its alcoholism rehabilitation program.

“She saw that as a primary cause of medical problems, the addiction to drugs and alcohol,” Mr. Solomon said. “She was compassionate and had human empathy. She had a certain touch with people.”

For a 1980 Blade article on the challenges of treating teenage alcoholics, Dr. O’Connor said that most studies on alcoholism and related problems had been done decades earlier on middle-aged men.

Yet professionals discovered teenage alcoholics to be different from their adult equivalents.

“We’ve found most are early dropouts who started drinking around 13 or 14. They’re heavy drinkers by 17 or 18, and most didn’t have much of a teenage experience,” Dr. O’Connor said in 1980. And though Flower only treated those 18 or older, many of her patients were shocked to hear they had a problem.

“They say, ‘I’m too young to be an alcoholic’ or ‘I can’t be an alcoholic. I only drink beer.’” she said then. 

A profile in the 1979 Flower Hospital annual report said that she was committed to helping those in the program and their families.

“She knows what’s needed in the community, and she knows what she wants the program to be — and she’s not hesitant about saying so,” according to the profile.

Early in her career, she worked in emergency medicine at what is now Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center.  She received a master of public health degree from Harvard University and became a general practitioner at the Toledo Health and Retiree Center, founded by the United Auto Workers. 

She later became Wood County health commissioner, and her duties included overseeing health care for migrant farm workers. Ms. O’Connor recalled that she and her brother accompanied their mother to immunization clinics for children of farm workers. Years later, a man in suit and tie approached Dr. O’Connor, introduced himself as one of those children, and said, “ ‘My mother was so happy I was allowed to get medical care,’” her daughter said. “That kind of stuff happened to her all the time.”

She later was assistant health commissioner in Cincinnati and visited rural mining communities of northern Kentucky to provide health care, her daughter said.

Dr. O’Connor was a former member of the Ohio State Medical Board, appointed in 1983 by then-Gov. Richard Celeste.

She was born on  April 17, 1933, in Harwich in southeastern England, to Dr. Kieran Phelan, a physician, and Maureen Guinan Phelan, a registered nurse. During World War II, when children were evacuated for their safety, she went to live with a grandmother in Dublin, while her younger brother, Patrick, went to live with relatives on an Irish farm.

“Being English in Ireland wasn’t easy. Being Irish in England wasn’t easy,” Ms. O’Connor said. “She was always not what everybody else was.”

As a result, her daughter said, “She saw the commonalities in everybody.”

She enrolled in the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, where she met Hugh O’Connor, of New York City, whose parents were Irish. They married after medical school, came to the United States — and in 1956 to Toledo at the invitation of Victor Bjork, administrator of Flower Hospital, then in the Old West End. 

Her husband died in a 1961 motorcycle crash in West Toledo. She continued a general practice before joining the staff of the Toledo Health Department and then pursuing her public health degree at Harvard, according to the 1979 Flower Hospital profile. She stayed in touch through the years with her brother-in-law, actor Carroll O’Connor, whose son, Hugh, was named for his brother.

Dr. O’Connor’s brother settled in Toledo in the 1960s.

While in medical school, her classmates came from all corners of the globe, Ms. O’Connor said. She could be private, yet “she had an eclectic group of people she always was around. She had so many friends.”

Mr. Silverman said: “She was delightful to be around. She had a certain elegance about her.”

She loved to entertain and invited family and friends to dinners and Sunday brunches, her sister-in-law, Sandra O’Phelan, said. On special holidays, her English trifle and flaming plum puddings were a hit.

Surviving are her husband, Donald Solomon, whom she married in 1970; son, Matthew O’Connor; daughter, Deirdre Ann O’Connor; two grandchildren, and a great-grandson.

Memorial services will be private. Arrangements are by the Robert H. Wick/Wisniewski Funeral Home

The family suggests tributes to Hospice of Northwest Ohio.

First Published March 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m.