Life-altering decision #1

The four photos above are the doctor's home at 16 Henley Beach Road, Mile End, immediately west of the metropolitan area of the city of Adelaide, where we lived for almost 3 years in 1957-1959; our 2 children Rebecca and David, in a little plastic paddle pool in the secluded, verdant oasis of fruit trees and garden, a secure child-friendly play area amidst a grimy industrial region; my mother Vera Last feeding her adored granddaughter Rebecca; and Rebecca showing her plastic blocks to her Great-Grandmother, my grandmother Millie Last.

By 1959 I was a confident family doctor, regarded as competent and capable by my partners in the group practice where I worked and by other colleagues with whom I worked and interacted in various ways. I was a prominent and eloquent advocate for general practice and community medicine, involved in the intellectual life of the rapidly emerging College of General Practitioners. I traveled interstate to meetings in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, exchanging ideas with my colleagues across Australia. I was going through a philosophical transformation, keen to widen my intellectual horizons, to learn more about the contexts in which people got sick or remained healthy and to study underlying reasons why some were healthy and others were sick. I wanted to understand too what impact medical care, the distribution of doctors, hospitals and specialized services, were having on levels of health and sickness in the population. I needed to spend a while in full-time study and research, to try to find the answers to the questions that were increasingly preoccupying my waking hours.

Wendy and I had talked about my evolving ideas and aspirations since before we were married. We were happy in our home and the practice, getting involved a little bit in the local community, but increasingly aware that it would not be possible to achieve my professional goals if we remained in general practice. It shocked my colleagues when I announced my intention to leave just as I was getting so fully immersed in general practice,  but Wendy and I felt that it was now or never. At the end of 1959 we made the first of our life-altering decisions. I resigned from the group practice to embark on a career in public health science, specifically in epidemiology.