Lepers’ Trust Memorial Scholarship Awarded

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 21

Lepers’ Trust Memorial Scholarship Awarded

Dr. P. Beck, a senior assistant medical officer in the Solomon Islands, has been chosen to come to New Zealand early next year, as the first senior Twomey medical scholar. This was announced by the convener of the grants committee (Mr A. H. T. Rose) at the quarterly meeting of the Lepers’ Trust Board in Christchurch.

The scholarship has been established by the Lepers’ Trust Board as a memorial to its founder, Mr P. J. Twomey, who was known through, out the Pacific as the “Leper man”.

Under the scholarship, specially selected island people from the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides, will be sent to Fiji or New Zealand for medical training. Some of them will study to qualify as doctors, and others, already doctors, will take post-graduate specialist courses.

The aim is that they will return better equipped to help their own people in the fight against leprosy and other tropical diseases.

Dr. Beck will briefly visit the Lepers’ Trust Board in Christchurch, before going to Dunedin to begin a course for a Diploma of Public Health, at the Medical School. He was educated in the Solomon Islands, and from 1952 to 1955 he studied at the Fiji School of Medicine, where he won gold medals in medicine and obstetrics. He has been awarded two World Health Organisation fellowships, in 1958 and in 1963. “The launching of this scheme is a worthy memorial to our founder,” said the chairman of the board (Mr A. S. Geddes). “We hope Dr. Beck will be followed by many more Islanders who can be helped to assist their own people.