After serving as a house physician at Bristol General Hospital, he studied medicine at King's College, London, where he received the degree MB BS (Lond.)
After a postgraduate educational visit to Kraepelin's clinic in Munich, he successively held junior appointments in England at London's Mount Vernon Hospital for Consumption, at Wakefield's West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, and at South West London's Chelsea Hospital for Women.
[2] From Long Grove Asylum he went as senior medical officer to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum and then became medical superintendent of the Portsmouth Mental Hospital (in 1937 renamed St. James' Hospital).
[1] In 1920 Devine was a member of the editorial committee of the newly founded Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology.
[1] Devine’s final post was that of medical superintendent of the Holloway Sanatorium, near Virginia Water, Surrey, where he worked through the decade of the 1930s until his retirement in 1938, due to ill health.