Reflections

Embracing the positive consequences arising from adverse circumstances underpins an optimistic futureTracking and tracing through the roots of your life searching for the meaning inherent in the snippets of memory is challenging because it is uncomfortable, confronting and emotional, but it is ultimately a positive experience to be drawn on as the days go by. Marjorie Woodrow (Nan) is my grandmother and has a quite extraordinary ...

Mark J Lock BSc, MPH,PhD

Since 2008, the Bouverie Centre, a family therapy and healing centre, in association with La Trobe University, has provided training for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child and family workers through a postgraduate certificate in family therapy. This landmark educational program is offered throughout Victoria and is delivered within the students’ communities. There are two training teams, each consisting of one Indigenous cultural consultant (family therapy-trained) ...

Robyne Latham MFA, GradDipEd

Global health is, by definition, an area of great breadth and depth. There is enormous diversity in health systems and health outcomes, with life expectancy at birth varying from 82–84 years in Australia and Japan to less than 55 years in more than 20 African countries. Despite this diversity and difference, communicable diseases such as HIV and severe acute respiratory syndrome, and our more recent understanding of the ...

A Rob Moodie MB BS, MPH

There are no sirens. Nor is the silence disrupted by the rush of feet or frantic blue lights. Instead, our enduring patients arrive at the hospital gates on foot, most having travelled for many hours, if not days, through the unrelenting 40° C heat; the privileged cling to motorcycles already laden with firewood and kitchen utensils in anticipation of a prolonged admission. Through these same gates arrived ...

James D Smith

John Greenwell was born on 10 October 1922 in Leura, New South Wales, to Harold and Sarah Greenwell. He was the youngest of four and his father owned a pharmacy in Katoomba. Educated at Katoomba Public School and Sydney Grammar School, he graduated in medicine from the University of Sydney in 1946. After a residency at St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, and a brief experience in general practice in ...

Stephen J Steigrad

Sir Peter Morris received an Honorary Doctor of Laws and delivered the 40th Halford Oration, “Organ transplantation: a medical miracle of the 20th century”, on 5 July 2012, as part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the University of Melbourne Medical School ...

Sir Peter J Morris AC, FRS, FRCS

DISTURBANCES OF SLEEP and daytime function are important diagnostic symptoms. Although most of us are well versed in the features and important impacts of sleep apnoea, a search for insomnia should be an indispensable part of most history-taking.Almost a third of our symptomatic patients present with symptoms of stress or mood disorder, where investigations of physical symptoms such as fatigue, dizziness, daily headache, chest pain ...

John M Worthington

Bob Kenihan was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on 1 February 1923, the son of Raphael Kenihan, a family medical practitioner. He attended Rostrevor College for his secondary schooling, before entering the University of Adelaide Medical School, from which he graduated in 1946. During this time, he excelled at sport, gaining a university Blue in lacrosse, as well as being proficient in cricket, swimming and golf. After ...

John M Svigos

Struan Robertson was born in Sydney on 27 January 1925, to parents who were both medical practitioners. He was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, North Sydney, where he rowed in the First VIII and was a Lieutenant in the Cadet Corps. In 1943, he joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) as a pilot and served in the New Guinea campaign in Bougainville ...

James B Roche

David Morton was born in Wauchope, New South Wales, on 9 May 1929, the son of a teacher. He achieved a maximum pass in the Leaving Certificate from Sydney Boys High School and commenced medicine at the University of Sydney in 1946. His older brother Max and sister Marion were both prosectors in anatomy there. David’s first year marks made him the family’s third prosector — ...

Alan D Hewson

John Brown was born on 5 August 1934 in Meadowbank, New South Wales. He lost both parents early in his teenage years and was then raised by his aunt, Doris Johnson. Despite these setbacks, he attended Fort Street Boys’ High and subsequently studied medicine at the University of Sydney. On graduating in 1957, he entered the emerging specialty of paediatrics. While training at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for ...

Lachlan T Brown

OVER 4 million children present each year to emergency departments (EDs) across Australia for acute medical care. This represents, on average, one visit per year per child. The appropriate management of these acutely ill and injured children requires specific expertise and, as a result, paediatric emergency medicine has increasingly become an important area of subspecialty training.Most children, however, will present to general EDs for their care ...

Amy C Plint

PATIENTS COMMONLY have problems in the mouth, nose and throat. This new book by Geoffrey Quail, who is Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Surgery, Monash University, Melbourne, and Director of the Dental and Maxillofacial Surgery Unit at Southern Health, Melbourne, provides clear and succinct information on the diagnosis of conditions affecting these areas. It will be helpful to anyone who needs an illustrated and ...

Michael Barakate

She was not told the meaning of absence why parents could not visit except on weekends — and then only for an hour. The 1906 Home Handbook of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine outlines the treatment for rheumatic afflictions — hot blanket packs, repeated. She remembers those who wrapped her body in hairy blankets to preserve her rheumatic heart — remembers how the blankets electrified her body so ...

Jennifer Harrison

Sir Keith Jones, who died on 2 March 2012 in his 101st year, had a long and distinguished medical career, during which he gave service to the medical profession through the British Medical Association in Australia and, later, in various capacities, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) after its formation in 1962. He was President of the AMA from 1973 to 1976 and Chairman of the Board of the Australasian ...

George D Repin

Emily Dickinson

Arjun von Caemmerer MB BS(Hons), FRACGP

THE COMPLEXITY of neurology is both alluring and intimidating — rather like learning Ancient Greek or a Bach five-part fugue. Attempts at popularisation often fail because of either persistent obscurity or oversimplification. In this book, Professor Roy Beran, from the School of Medicine, Griffith University, Queensland, has produced a practical overview which aims to be approachable without dumbing down.To this task he is eminently suited, ...

Timothy J Kleinig

IT WAS always going to be a difficult task to summarise all possible paediatric presentations into a single book to help junior medical staff “on call”, so the authors of this effort are to be commended.This is an Australian adaptation of the popular American handbook, and all three Australian authors — Browne, McCaskill and Cheng — are senior staff in the emergency department at the ...

Julian J Kelly

A group of Indigenous Research Fellows describe the lessons learnt from their involvement in Indigenous health researchWe are a group of Indigenous Research Fellows (IRFs) involved in the Kanyini Qualitative Study (KQS), examining barriers and enablers to chronic disease care for Indigenous Australians. The KQS forms part of the Kanyini Vascular Collaboration (KVC), a health services research program established to reduce the burden and suffering ...

Ricky A Mentha GradCert (RemoteHealthMgmt) · Joanne de Vries DipPHC · Pamela R Simon · Barry N Fewquandie GradCert(PHC) · John Brady BSciApp · Suzanne Ingram BA(Comm), GradCertHealthSciences

PROPOSALS FOR CHANGE, states Machiavelli, with whom the book opens, are met with retaliation from those “who do well out of the old order”. Jorm’s book regards “the old order” as “senior consultants doing it this way for twenty or thirty or forty years”. But another, more recent, order is also under fire: the increasing bureaucratic regulation of medical practice enacted by “primitive and poorly ...

Rick A M Iedema