Article Types
Reflections
Thomas Trauer BA(Hons), PhD
Thomas (Tom) Trauer was born in Manchester, England, on 10 November 1944. Although his Jewish parents had escaped the Holocaust, few of their wider family survived and, as an only child, Tom became the sole member of his generation. Previously qualified in Prague, Tom’s father Robert repeated his medical degree in Adelaide in order to practise in Australia, and the family settled in St Kilda. While ...
James M Trauer
Practising in PNG: pidgin, rugby and yaws
Anthony Radford was the inaugural professor of primary care at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. Before and after that appointment, he accumulated a total of 50 years of experience in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Radford first went to that country as a student in 1951; from 1963 to 1972, he was a public health officer there; and later, he consulted on PNG for the World Health ...
Robert B Black
Pointers for pandemic planning
As the World Health Organization regularly reminds us, neither the timing nor the severity of the next influenza pandemic can be predicted. So, when avian influenza A(H5N1) virus emerged and fatal human cases were detected in a number of countries from 2003 onwards, pandemic planning took centrestage. At that time, those tasked with writing and implementing pandemic plans had no easy reference or experience to draw ...
Gina Samaan
Are global health leaders effectively strengthening local public health systems?
Are global health leaders and funding bodies doing enough to ensure that the rhetoric surrounding health system strengthening becomes reality, or has the concept been relegated to that of a buzzword?
Mary C Boyle MB BCh, DTM
A difficult conversation
Breaking bad news is a necessary, never-ending challenge for doctors.
Emma Foster MB BS
Hubert (Hugh) Roy Harris MB BS
Hubert (Hugh) Harris was a country doctor who earned the respect and affection of all who knew him. Hugh was born in Stockton, New South Wales, in 1919 to Dr Hubert and Emily Harris. He was educated at Armidale and studied medicine at the University of Sydney. On graduating in 1943, Hugh was appointed a resident medical officer at Grafton Base Hospital. In 1944, he enlisted in the ...
James Rae
ICU
is a fortress, you press a button and wait like some malevolent bacterium. “I’m here to see my wife” a click, a heavy sliding. Arterial corridors a nurse at a station an orderly with a trolley of folded white sheets. Another nurse, a tiny ante-room. Hygiene is vital: over your clothes, you pull a white gown of tough matt paper, you tie the back slip on a face-mask, elastic behind your ears — your breathing’s toxic. An ...
John Upton
Social media and medical education: making an animated video for YouTube
A physician partners with a filmmaker to create an educational video for clinicians, and reflects on the possibilities and pitfalls of using social media for medical education.
Joseph E Ibrahim MB BS, PhD, FRACP · Prateek Bandopadhayay MB BS, LLB, LLM
Can you tell a siren from a tocsin?
A personal battle between objectivity and emotion complicates decisions about our own health care.
John Best AO, MD BS, PhD, DSc(Hon)
Dorothy (Billie) Grace Greening MB BS, DObstRCOG, FRACOG, FRCOG
Dorothy (Billie) Greening was born on 13 April 1917 in Sydney. Her father was a confectioner, and she had one brother and three sisters. The family moved to Glen Innes, where she gained her leaving certificate and topped the class. Billie trained as a nurse at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney and studied midwifery at Crown Street Women’s Hospital. In 1943, she joined the Australian Army Nursing ...
James B Roche
Arrhythmia management distilled
The authors of this book work in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, and are well known to and respected by many Australian cardiologists working in the field of cardiac arrhythmia. The first edition was published in 2010. In view of the rapid advances in arrhythmia management, particularly the new medication and guidelines for management of atrial fibrillation (AF), as well as in catheter ablation, ...
William F Heddle
Australian Medical Students’ Association Global Health Essay Competition — Global climate change, geo-engineering and human health
Manipulation of climate settings on a planetary scale is increasingly proposed as a safety valve in the event of runaway climate change. Understanding the potential effects on human health is urgent and necessary.
Costa S Boyages BArts(Hons), LLB
If you want to have joy, do
Before I migrated to Australia, I had my darkest years working in a community mental health service, in a deprived area in the north-west of England. Our senior psychiatrist was a sociopathic bully from the mean streets of inner Belfast and he must have survived by trying to be one of the tough kids. He was rumoured to have once headbutted an aggressive patient in ...
Sandra F Armstrong
Elegy to a goldfish
I can’t remember when my brother and I decided to kill you, small fish with no school, bright and happy at the bottom slipping through the gate of your fake castle. I think it was winter. A part of us aware of the death outside, the leaves being burned up and the squirrels starving inside the oaks, the sky knocking its clouds into the ashtray of the city. And it might have been me who ...
Matthew Dickman
John Andrew Pickering OAM, MB ChB, GradDipHA, FRACGP, FRACMA
John Pickering was born on 16 April 1938 in Egypt and graduated in medicine from the University of Sheffield, England, in 1961.In 1964, he came to Australia to work as a resident medical officer at Wimmera Base Hospital in Horsham, Victoria. The following year, he moved to nearby Dimboola, working in general practice with the revered Alister Hinchley.John moved to New South Wales in 1970, working as ...
Alan M Wolff
Neat model for ethical problem solving
Into a fourth edition — and my, how it’s grown! Having started life in 1998 at a portable (but hardly pocket-sized) 500 pages, it is now a hefty 1200. Most of the growth comes from the doubling in size of the chapters, with a few entirely new sections for this edition, most notably some cautionary tales about emerging biotechnologies. Sexuality and reproduction has received much greater attention, ...
Peter W Saul
MJA, MDA National, Nossal Global Health Prize — Utilising humanism to (re)fortify global health leadership
Young physicians-in-training are so automatically programmed into believing that global health frameworks and health systems are broken beyond repair that a vicious cycle breeds. Breaking this cycle requires zeal fuelled by humanism.
Nilofer K Habibullah BMSc
John Warwick Newman MB BS, FRCOG, FRACOG
John (known as Warwick) Newman was born on 2 February 1928 at Cullen Bullen near Lithgow in New South Wales, where his father was the mines manager. He attended Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) and commenced medicine at the University of Sydney in 1948. In his second year of medicine, he developed severe type 1 diabetes and needed to take 2 years off from his course. During ...
James B Roche
MJA Eric Dark Creative Writing Prize - There must be joy
The story of one woman’s journey through heartbreak to peace and acceptance.
Name withheld
John Hugh Wilson Hogg OAM, MB BS, FRACS, FRCS, FRCSI, DDU
John Hogg was a true all-rounder — sportsman, explorer, sailor and skier, as well as surgeon, devoted husband and father, and academic. He died at home on 1 March 2013 from metastatic melanoma. John was born in Sydney on 10 January 1943 and was educated at Trinity Grammar School, where his father, James Wilson Hogg, was headmaster. After graduating in medicine from the University of Sydney in 1967, he spent 2 years ...
Stephen E J Andersen
MJA Dr Eric Dark Creative Writing Prize - Joy to Mary
A doctor meets a former patient who can’t quite meet her eye.
Leeann Carr-Brown MB BS, FRACGP
MJA Dr Eric Dark Creative Writing Prize - A good hairdresser
A doctor gets to know the man of few words who has conveniently set up shop across the road from the hospital
Geoffrey C Mullins MB BS, FANZCA, FRCPC
The progress of molecular genetics
GREAT SCIENCE is characterised by discovery and by finding solutions to real problems. Unlike physics, where a prediction based in theory leads to a search for supporting evidence, progress in biology depends more on systematic experimentation and observation than on any grand hypothesis. This is because biological systems have sequentially and adaptively evolved via mutations in the designer code of our genes. Without an overarching ...
Peter C Doherty
Internship: a journey of wrong turns and coloured forms
Trying to keep a firm hold on things in a fraught initial weekDiving out of bed at 5.00 am on Monday, I shower and preen like it’s my Year 12 formal, dressing with purpose in my carefully selected outfit. By 6.45 am, the ruminations on why one would be stupid enough to choose medicine as a career have begun. “Imposter syndrome” has set in. I could have been ...
Rachel L Jones Lumby MB BS, BA, BCom
Graeme Kian Giap Lim MB BS, FRACS
Graeme Lim was born on 29 December 1946 in Bandung, Indonesia. His arrival in Queensland at the age of 16 was an immense culture shock. He had no parents here and the White Australia Policy was in force. Graeme attended St Paul’s School in the Brisbane suburb of Bald Hills, mastered English, entered the medical course at the University of Queensland, studied hard and drove a taxi at night. ...
John D Morris
