Henry Cyril ('Bill') Adams served in the Australian Army Medical Corps during World War I from 1916 to 1918, with the rank of major. He was appointed honorary physician to Sydney Hospital in 1920 and remained in that post until he reached retiring age at the end of 1936 when he was made an honorary consultant physician. He was still in private practice as a consultant at 183 Macquarie Street when the College was founded in 1938 and he was elected a foundation Fellow.
He achieved a certain fame as a teacher of medicine and anaesthetics to medical students, in part because of his sartorial elegance and theatrical manner, especially when discoursing on bellies, but mainly because of his vigorous espousal of focal sepsis as a major cause of many ailments. `Sep' became his second nickname.