Foreword by John M. Ward, AO, Vice-Chancellor and Principal
From Faculty of Medicine Online Museum and Archive
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY celebrated its own centenary over thirty years ago. This year it celebrates the centenary of teaching in the Faculty of Medicine (and also the Faculty of Engineering). Within a relatively short space of time there will be other centenaries to celebrate and other professions to recall the role of the University in producing their practitioners and extending their knowledge. The book that the Faculty of Medicine has produced for its centenary is a model of its kind. Here is clear evidence that no scholar in any field, who knows the subject and has a good sense of time and relevance, need fear to be an historian. A professional historian would have done things differently but possibly at the price of that sense of immediacy, involvement and intense personal interest which characterises this book and provides its fascination.
I congratulate those who have written this book or worked for it. They have sifted legends as well as original sources. They have given us materials for judgments beyond those that the authors themselves have attempted. The result is an immensely readable account of the origins of the Faculty, how it grew, how it taught, how it fostered high clinical standards, and how it contributed to research. There are many giants in the history of the Faculty of Medicine. As an undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts in the nineteen-thirties I heard stories of Anderson Stuart, J. T. Wilson and many others. The book is rich in material about men and women who were great characters as well as builders, teachers, clinicians and researchers.
Their successors lament to me sometimes that the days of the giants are over. I am sure that this is a mistake. Medicine was and still is a Faculty in which individual distinction and exceptional personal qualities flourish within the necessary discipline of a well-organized profession. Think of John Loewenthal, who combined exceptional prowess as a surgeon with a power to influence his students, his Faculty, his profession and his University in ways that are already legendary.
The giants are all in the book. So also are many of those whose labours at quite different levels made the achievements of the Faculty possible. What we now call the support staff also had its share of exceptional people. They receive well-deserved attention in their own right. In a book which necessarily has to refer to the expansion of medical knowledge, the growth of the profession, the changes in the medical curriculum and the development of the University itself, it is the people who stand out for their triumphs, their continued devotion to duty and, on occasion, their failings and misfortunes.
For a book that is written soberly, modestly and with a strict purpose of recording the facts, this one has turned out unintentionally to be a story of outstanding achievement, past, present and future. There is no self-glorification here. The facts speak louder than could any paean of praise. It is for the historian, who is Vice-Chancellor and Principal, to congratulate the Faculty on its record and its standing and the authors of this book on their achievement.
John M. Ward, AO, Vice-Chancellor and Principal Sydney, 21 March 1983
Go to next article in timeline: Foreword by Richard Gye, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Go back to contents page of Centenary Book of the University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine (1984) by J Young, A Sefton and N Webb