MEDICAL SCHOOL DIRECTORSHIP

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22293, 20 June 1934, Page 6

MEDICAL SCHOOL DIRECTORSHIP

We do not profess to know the precise significance of the decision of the University Council yesterday to appoint Sir Lindo Ferguson to the office of Director of the Medical School. There are directors of each of the other specialised departments of the University, and it may conceivably have been to repair an accidental omission that the office of Director of the Medical School is now being created. As Dean of the Medical,Faculty, Sir Lindo has, it may be supposed, actually for many years past been the director of the School. But if the new office has been, created to mark the sense of the deep obligation under which the University has been, placed by Sir Lindo’s devoted and invaluable services to the School, and if it was necessary that the office should be created for that purpose, the whole community will agree that' the Council has taken a commendable step. It is an interesting circumstance that, as was mentioned yesterday, fifty years have passed since Sir Lindo Ferguson, a pioneer in the practice of ophthalmology in Otago, opened the department in the Dunedin Hospital for the treatment of eases of affection of the eye, ear, and throat, and it is highly appropi’iate, therefore, that occasion should now bo taken to recognise formally the distinguished service rendered by him to the public in his professional capacity. Upon the Medical School he has lavished an unabated interest as warmly affectionate as Tf it had been an institution founded and maintained by himself. Its advancement and development, until it ranks with*many similar schools in countries much more largely populated than ours is, may be traced in very'considerable degree to the vision with which he has planned its extensions, to the weight of argument with which he has pleaded for the establishment of fresh chairs, and to the solicitude with which he lias ceaselessly watched over its growth. With it his name should be inseparably associated.