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n ‘The man with the<br />
camera!’ Joe is well known<br />
to conference attendees and<br />
speakers around the world.<br />
He would position himself<br />
near the front of the room<br />
with his camera around his<br />
neck. During presentations he<br />
would wander about taking<br />
lots of shots, mainly of the<br />
speakers but sometimes of<br />
the audience. A bit unnerving<br />
the first time encountered.<br />
John Ryan | emergency<br />
physician, Dublin, Ireland<br />
n The thing Joe taught me<br />
was in history taking and the<br />
information he recorded in<br />
the patient’s history: always<br />
written in ink and legible,<br />
but most of all succinctly<br />
describing the person and<br />
what was wrong. I have tried<br />
to emulate him in this area of<br />
clinical medicine ever since.<br />
It amuses me now, but when<br />
asking Joe a question, most<br />
of the time he would give a<br />
discourse on why the question<br />
was not correct, and how it<br />
could have been put better<br />
and elicited more information.<br />
n The emergency department at the Western used to be a<br />
wild and woolly place. On my first receiving day at the Western<br />
I asked Joe about a guy with stab wounds who had been<br />
found in a telephone box. Joe told me not to worry about him<br />
as his mates had come to the ED with baseball bats to finish<br />
him off, so he wasn’t a surgical problem anymore! Actually<br />
the guy survived, the devil looking after his own I guess.<br />
What really struck me was Joe’s calmness as he recounted<br />
this story. After my genteel upbringing at the Royal<br />
Melbourne Hospital, this was something to behold.<br />
In that first week there was another case which was<br />
unusual to my eyes at any rate. The registrar was doing an<br />
appendectomy and delivered a small spleen from the right<br />
iliac fossa. Again Joe when noting this was unbemused,<br />
indicating this was a well recognised case of ‘right<br />
sidedness’, again something far from my experience.<br />
Finally Joe really showed his qualities of calmness and support<br />
when he helped our surgical team and me, in particular,<br />
through a difficult clinical episode at the Western Health.<br />
A lifelong friend.<br />
Robert Thomas | surgeon, Melbourne.<br />
Formerly of Western Health<br />
The man with the camera!<br />
Bob Smith | anaesthetist,<br />
Western Health<br />
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