The young ambulance driver I mentioned in my last post who died of the overwhelming toxaemia influenza can cause, was one of two siblings I had known since school days. Let me call him Bob Monkhouse - not his real name. He and his sister Jessie (not her real name either) had gone to expensive private schools. Jessie's plans, or her mother's plans for her, included a 'finishing school' in Switzerland, something almost unheard of in late 1940s Adelaide. Bob Monkhouse had gone to Geelong Grammar School, reputedly the best boys' school in Australia and surely the costliest, was destined for the diplomatic service after he finished his degree in law. Their mother threw the most lavish parties in Adelaide. They could afford all the frills: Mr Monkhouse, a meek-looking man, was the Adelaide head office manager of one of Australia's biggest banks and his wife came from an old established land-owning family. I was surprised when I got back from England in 1954 to find Bob Monkhouse playing golf at my grotty little club. I'd have expected him to play at the Royal Adelaide Golf Club, with its pristine fairways, manicured greens and challenging bunkers. As for Jessie, instead of a finishing school in Switzerland, she was a shop assistant in a department store. I discovered what had happened when I became their family doctor. Meek and mild Mr Monkhouse had run away from his family and his bank, with a very large amount of the bank's money and one of its young female clerks. His wife had sold their gracious home, her jewelry, their cars, and much else, to pay in part for her husband's misdeeds. Her name and accounts of her children's glamourous parties no longer appeared in the social pages of the Adelaide Advertiser. Bob and Jessie took their lumps rather well, all things considered, Bob especially so. He was a modest, caring young man, committed to doing good. He had been obliged to abandon his law degree and get a job to help support his mother. It was his choice to work as an ambulance driver. He felt he was doing something worth while and although I didn't know him well, he didn't seem to me to regret the diplomatic career his mother had sought for him.
In about the second week of the influenza pandemic of 1958, Jessie phoned early one morning, asked me to come to see Bob who, she said, was very ill. They lived nearby and fortunately I called first thing. He was indeed very ill, high fever, semiconscious, very breathless and a nasty colour. There were no anti-viral drugs in those days. I was concerned enough about him to go back to see him mid-morning. I found him much worse, indeed critically ill. I sent him to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where he was placed in what passed in those days for intensive care. I went back to see how he was doing early that afternoon, got there just in time to be present at his death. When I had first seen him about breakfast time that day, he had said a strange thing: "I forgive you all," he said, "even Dad." Thinking about it a few days later when I had time to pause briefly in the midst of that hectic pandemic, I concluded that he must have had a premonition of his impending death, one of very few similar experiences in my life as a family doctor. His death was the end of the family. Without his moral fibre to sustain her, Jessie followed her mother's lead into alcohol dependence. I saw her by chance on one of my return visits to Adelaide about 20-25 years later, and wouldn't have recognized her if she hadn't made herself known to me. She told me her mother had died and her father had surrendered to police a few years earlier and was in prison. She was still a shop assistant, by then in charge of a whole department
Bob Monkhouse's rapidly fatal illness, and the very similar death of a midwifery nurse in the hospital where I did most of my obstetrics and whom I had also known since her childhood, were two events I recalled during my convalescence from a life-threatening bout of virus pneumonia that laid me low a couple of months after the Asian influenza pandemic had subsided. The deaths of these two fine young people made me reflect on how much more worth while it would be to spend my own life trying to find ways to prevent such deaths. So it's true to say that these deaths played a role in shaping my career.
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