The country boy who became Australia’s most famous GP
There was no closing of the clock. Diseases and misfortunes have no calendar, and who else could save those who needed saving?
Murtaghs were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In the pre-Medicare days, patients who couldn’t find the money for treatment were never turned away. Dr Jill Murtagh recalls a friend turning up at the practice door offering a bag of potatoes in lieu of payment, and it was not uncommon for produce to turn up from local gardens.
The people of Southern Neerim and the beautiful surrounding hills were blessed.
They didn’t know how blessed they were.
John Murtagh – started his working life as an entrepreneur high school science teacher Before studying medicine – he would soon become Australia’s most famous general practitioner and his teachings influenced GPs around the world.
The textbook he would write after being called from the bush to become a senior lecturer at Monash University. General Application of MurtaghThis book, now in its ninth edition, is considered the gold standard for training general practitioners.
Professor John Murtagh with Murtagh’s General Practice, an edition of the textbook that made him world famous.
It has been translated into 13 languages since its first edition in 1994.
A few years ago, when China’s health authorities began persuading their country’s doctors to switch from traditional medicine to internationally accepted practice, the Chinese version of Mandarin General Application It became a standard text.
In his so-called retirement, Murtagh became an Honorary Professor at Peking University Health Sciences Centre, in addition to a Professorial Fellowship appointment at the University of Melbourne and an adjunct clinical professorship at the University of Notre Dame.
Professor John Murtagh gives a talk at Monash University.
Murtagh learned at an early age the virtue of country doctors and the value of describing in clear and concise terms the most complex ailments and the practical procedures for dealing with them.
In 1944, at the age of eight, he contracted polio, a viral disease that regularly ravaged Australia to epidemic proportions, frightening parents because it could maim or kill children.
Generations of Australians have read about what it means to survive polio I can jump through puddlesauthor Alan Marshall’s immensely popular memoir.
Raised in the village of Noorat near Terang in western Victoria, Marshall contracted polio in 1908 at the age of six and lost the use of his legs.
The Murtagh family lived further down the rural road in the small rural town of Coleraine in Victoria’s south-west.
Happily, Coleraine was rewarded with a country doctor named Bill Tonkin.
His ability to diagnose and treat almost any disease or medical emergency was considered by the locals to have reached a magical level.
Dr Tonkin gave birth to young John Murtagh in 1936 and treated members of the large Murtagh family for many years.
When polio came to visit, Tonkin splinted young John to prevent his spine from bending, and visited regularly during the four months the boy was bedridden, often sitting and chatting; This proves that the art of listening is an important part of any treatment.
The routine administration of the Salk vaccine to Australian schoolchildren in 1956 was the beginning of the end of polio in Australia.
Students at Scotch College in Melbourne queue for the Salk vaccine against polio.Credit: AGE
It worked amazingly well.
The last recorded case in Australia was in 1972, and in 2000 Australia declared the disease eliminated.
As one of the children who lined up for the polio vaccine at school in the 1950s, I’d like to ask Murtagh his opinion on the 21st-century anti-vaccine movements, especially at the highest levels of the Trump administration in the US. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic. He is the Minister of Health.
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I suspect that the good doctor’s opinion will be particularly frank, although he has always been a soft-spoken man, as I discovered when I first met him six years ago that I had not the faintest idea of his fame.
Unfortunately it’s too late now.
Emeritus Professor John Murtagh died at Alfred Hospital last week, aged 89, surrounded by his family.
He and Jill raised two sons and three daughters, most of whom went into the medical profession.
One of those girls, Melbourne sports journalist Julie Tullberg, who teaches at Monash University, remembers passing the honors board at Alfred Hospital last week as she ran to her dying father.
And displayed on the wall was a list of Robert Power Scholarship winners; The surgery winner in 1966 was JE Murtagh. This was the year the young doctor graduated with the first group of students to study medicine at Monash.
Professor John Murtagh, always a sought-after teacher, teaches a course at Monash University.
Compliments poured in from everywhere, which is no surprise; There was a country doctor who was awarded a Life Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and a Life Fellowship of the World Organization of Family Physicians in 2007 for his contributions to global family medicine.
The president of the royal college, Dr. “For generations of GPs, including my own, Professor Murtagh was the most famous GP we have ever known,” said Michael Wright.
The boy from Coleraine had come a long way, but everyone knew that his heart had never left the forest.
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