He then left to become a ship's doctor on a cargo liner sailing to Japan and South America.
On his return to land, Lyons settled in Manchester, England, where he met, and in 1950 married, a Welsh nurse, Muriel Jones.
Lyons achieved a WHO fellowship to visit leading neurological centres in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco.
Lyons wrote much about Irish medical history and contributed chapters to other books, including Diseases in Dubliners: Tokens of Disaffection (1981) In 2002 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland published Borderlands: essays on literature and medicine in honour of J.
B. Lyons / edited by Davis Coakley and Mary O’Doherty (Dublin: Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, 2002).