HOSPITAL SYSTEM

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 102, 11 April 1933, Page 7

HOSPITAL SYSTEM

l DEVELOPMENT SUGGESTED UNIVERSITY INSTITUTION FAVOURED. . EMINENT SURGEON’S PROPOSALS. By Telegraph-Press Assn.-Copyright. (Received 11, 11.45 a.m.) SYDNEY, April 11. At the annual meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Professor F. Gordon Bell suggested the establishment of a University hospital under the direction of professors of medicine and surgery and a system of compulsory universal sickness insurance. , “The natural logical outcome of the Bosch clinical professorships,” said Professor Bell, “is the establishment of a University hospital of about 200 beds on the lines of the best German or Swiss University hospital clinics. The professor of surgery would have absolute control of 100 beds with an assistant staff of varying grades of seniority. I would like to see this experiment made at Sydney, controlled by the University and directed by its clinical professors. Students would benefit and the public, in due course, from better trained doctors. It would have to bo financed chiefly by the University but partly by the State.” Professor Bell was delivering the second George Syme Oration. He criticised the free use of public hospitals for surgical treatment by persons who were able to pay for it. Appointed to the chair of Surgery at the Otago University in 1924, Professor F. G. Bell has had a brilliant career. He was born in New Zealand and received his early education at Marlborough College. He graduated Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery at Edinburgh University in 1910, and was awarded the Ettles Scholarship as the most distinguished graduate of the year. He graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1913, and for his thesis, “The Development and Histology of the Oc cipital Region of the Brain,” he was awarded the Goodsir Memorial Fellowship for the best anatamical and physiological thesis submitted. After graduating he spent a year as a Vans Dunlap Research Scholar in the Department of Anatomy, under Professor Robinson, and in 1912 he was appointed house surgeon in the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. Professor Bell spent part of 1914 in Berlin, and afterwards had the great privilege of being selected as Foundation Fellow to Dr. Charles Mayo and for four months worked in the Mayo Clinic Research, in Rochester, United States. He was offered a post on the staff of the clinic, but war broke out and he felt it his duty to return to military service in Europe. During the last three years of the war he was surgical specialist of a casualty clearing station, and for his work in this capacity he was awarded the Military Cross in 1917, and was mentioned in dispatches in 1919. After the war Professor Bell was approached by the Rockefeller Foundation with a view to his going to Bankok as visiting professor of surgery to help in establishing the Siamese University on European lines, but he was unable to accept the position. Medical men under whom Professor Bell has worked describe him as one of the most brilliant graduates of Edinburgh University.