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ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, ACADEMIC SESSION, OF THE
AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE OF GENERAL PHICTITIONERS, AT
WILSON HALL, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
ADMISSION OF SIR ROBERT PJENZIES AS AN HONORARY
FELLOW: J OF THE COLLEGE 9TH OCTOBE__ 126+
Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. Sir Robet -le
Your Excellency and Sir
This shors how wrong one may be, because I came
here tonight saying to myself, " His Excellency the Governor
will make a speech and I'll be able to pick up a crumb or
two, and then my old friend, Sir Victor Coppleson, he will
speak." Not he. silent as the tomb, and therefore all
that is left for me to do is to say thank you very much, Sir.
I appreciate this honour, and in a strange, odd
fashion, you know, I have rather earned it. Would you
mind if I developed that theory a little?
As you know, in the course of a life of a man
like me, one acquires certain things by merit and other
things by favour, I managed to get a degree or two in
this university by working for them and in later years I
have been given a series of unearned honours which give me
the most immense satisfaction. For eximple, I am a surgeon.
Never let anybody entrust himself to my scalpel, but I am
still a surgeon. dhenever my general practitioner looks at
me, or even my expert specialist consultant who is going to
make a speech tonight, I like to remind them that I am a
surgeon and I am also a physician, and also, you don't think
I am boasting this is a simple narractive of fact I am
a gynaecologist and obstetrician, though -hether as a
patient or a practitioner has never been made quite clear.
I seem to remember that I am an architect, but not-responsible
for everything you see. I am a builder, I am a scientist.
This is a boasting record, but I mention it to you firstly
to say I didn't earn any of them and, secondly, to make
you understand after all these events that I am now so
superbly qualified to become a general practitioner.
Now Sir, I have been lucky enough in my life
not to encounter professionally the medical profession too
much. I used to have a bit of fun in a clean way at the
bar in my time, cross-examining doctors, who are very easy
to cross-examine, much easier than when you are their gatient,
and I haven't been their patient all that much, but I ave
d. ived long enough to have the most tremendous regard for
what goes on in the medical world and I have lived long
enough to have a particular regard for the work done by the
general practitioner, because the general practitioner, as
His Excellency said, he is the family doctor, he is the man
you know, he is the man who knows you, knows the family,
who can speak intimately and yet with authority and he is
the man who, over a long period of time, has been the first
diagnostician when he comes to handle something in the family
or in the family circle. / 2
-2
I find it hard to believe, Mr. Chancellor, when I
look back on my time here and on your time here when we who
were students of the law certainly understood that we were
much more intelligent than the iue9, ical students, I find it
hard to believe how many of these scamps who were medical
students in my time have now become the most trusted family
advisers. And they have, and that proves, of course that it
is a jolly good thing to get it out of your system atsome
time or another, because I venture to say that there are more
millions of people in Australia who owe a debt to the family
doctor than there are any corresponding number who o'., re a debt
to any other particular group in the community
I have been exercised, as I know you have in this
College, exercised about what is going to happen in the future,
because in my own lifetime, which goes back before the turn
of the century, all sorts of astonishing things have happened
in the medical world. I have no doubt that at the time when
I was born, the true function of a physician was to keep his
patient quiet and allow nature to take its course. I have
no doubt that not long before I was born and before all the
subleties of anaesthesia were being got to be understood,
surgery was a chancy thing; in fact, it is only in the memory
of some men still living that antiseptic surgery gave place
to aseptic surgery.
It is really an astonishing thing for somebody like
me to realise that in his own lifetime the greatest discoveries
affecting mankind have not been i ' n the field of destruction
as some people think, but in the field of preserving life as
more people ought to think. Because of all these things the
work of the biochemb-sts, the work of the microbiologists, the
extraordinary developments of drugs and techniques in the
specialised fields, it must become increasingly difficult for
a general practitione-r whose day begins at any hour of the
early hours of the morning and whose day ends at about the
same time, It must be difficult for him to feel that his
tremendous job of dealing with people in the broad and dealing
with people in the particular has to be performed against a
background of knowledge with which he must feel, occasionally,
he is losing touch,
Now this is a problem I thinkc that I, as an outsider,
understand. Do we want general practitioners merely for an
instrument for passing patients on to great specialised experts?
I hope not. Or do we want the trusted family doctors skilled
in understanding, skilled in diagnosis, to preserve hs position
byr keeping up, in the broad and in the particular, his knowledge
of the new developments in medicine, so there is not an
unbridgeable gulf between What he knows he understands and
wrhat he knows is understood by the most refined specialties
in the medical and surgical xworld? If I were a family
practitioner this is what I would want to feel. Yes, of
course, there are great specia'Lised experts who know more than
I do in their particular field-they ought to, because I have
to cover at the beginning at least, all fields. But I do
iwant to Lelieve that every year I know more and more about the
new discoveries, that 1 am every year becoming competent to
understand these latest developments and to know what it is
that my highly qualified specialist will be talking about, @ 0900 * 0/ 3
3-
This is tremendously true. Jeare not having a
great gulf betw,, een the specialist and the general practitioner,
because if we do, the general practitioner will begin to feel
more and more tbat he merely begins something and that the
skill, the expertise, must belong to other people. If I
were a specialist in some branch of medicine, I wrould want to
know that general practitioners every year knew more and
more about the kind of thing that I was concerned with, and
I am sure that the general practitioners would want that
too, That means, as I understand it, the reason that
this College has been established I heard about this
before it was established. Wy own family doctor used to
address me very earnestly on this subject when he had me
at what you understand to be a disadvantaget and even
from the beginning I can see quite clearly that a College
of General Practitioners, which is going to include within
its scope educational work, refresher courses, lectures and
practice in matters which are new, is going to do something
even more tremendous for the whole body of medical knowledge
and of practice, and so Sir, surgeon though I may be, I
think this is one of the great moments of my life. I have
been a general practitioner in other fields for a long time.
It is a very great honour to become a general practitioner
in the field of medicine.