WORK WELL KNOWN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27229, 4 November 1949, Page 6

WORK WELL KNOWN

RESEARCH IN DUNEDIN INTEREST SHOWN OVERSEAS PROFESSOR SMIRK’S TOUR “The research work being done in Dunedin seems to be quite well known in the United States,” said Professor F. H. Smirk, who returned to Dunedin yesterday from overseas, in an interview with the Daily Times. The work done here by the University of Otago, assisted by the Medical Research Council of New Zealand, in connection with high blood pressure, neuro-physiology, and thyroid disease, among other things, had been referred to frequently in his discussions with various American research leaders. High opinions of the work of New Zealand graduates,in England had also been expressed to him while he was there. * Doctor Smirk, who is professor of the Department of Medicine at the Otago Medical School, returned yesterday from a post as visiting professor at the British Post Graduate Medical School, Hammersmith, England. At the school, he lectured on heart disorders, and high blood pressure and gave cunical instruction to post-graduate students. He met a good ■number of New Zealand graduates while he was at the school. He had been able to indulge his special interest, high blood pressure, while he was abroad, Dr Smirk said. He had met some of the foremost re-

search workers in this field and he considered that some of the information he had gained would be of practical value in Dunedin. But he had not confined his interest to blood pressure. He had attempted to give time and thought to anything seeming to be of value. Most of the tihie, however, had been devoted to other medical interests. At the post graduate school and many of the medical schools in England as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh, he had learned a good deal that would be of assistance at the University of Otago and the Dunedin Public Hospital, Dr Smirk said. He had also been able to visit the medical schools at Copenhagen and Stockholm and had observed the hospital building programmes of Scandinavia. With the assistance of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he had visited several medical schools in New York. His American tour had included visits to the schools at North Carolina, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Cleveland Los Angeles San Francisco and the Mayo,Clinic at Rochester. Minnesota. He had had a very interesting time.