John Richard Stawell was born in Melbourne on 21 March 1913 and died in Melbourne on 30 March 1983 aged seventy. He was the only son of Sir Richard Rawdon Stawell, a distinguished physician, one of the founders of the Royal Australasian College, and grandson of Sir William Foster Stawell, one time Chief Justice of Victoria after whom the city of Stawell was named. His mother was Evelyn Myrrhee Connolly, matron of the Foundling Hospital, East Melbourne. John started his education at Melbourne Grammar School in 1922, moving to Geelong Grammar School in 1925 where he spent seven years as a boarder. He is remembered as a quiet fellow at school who played a good game of tennis. Like his father he was never robust. In 1932 he entered the medical course at the University of Melbourne with his first three years in Trinity College, his father having been a student there in the 1880s.
John and his two sisters had their family home in the city at 45 Spring Street where his father also had his consulting rooms, using the ground floor dining room as a waiting room, a simulacrum of Harley Street in London. Sir Richard had been appointed President-Elect of the first Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association to be held in Australia in 1935 and his untimely death from a heart attack shortly before the next meeting was a great blow to the family and particularly John. The next year he and Lady Stawell moved to a house in South Yarra opposite "Como" of National Trust fame and on her death lived there for many years. John graduated in 1938 in those days of uncertainty just before World War II. He did his first resident year at the Royal Melbourne Hospital with Blois Lawton (qv 1) in Medicine and Henry Searby in Surgery and the following year with Hal Maudsley (qv 1), the first psychiatrist appointed to the hospital. John was involved in those early years of intravenous cardiazole shock treatment, the forerunner of ECT.
In 1940 he enlisted in the AIF and was posted as RMO to a field artillery regiment in the Darwin area, being there at the time of the devastating Japanese air raids. In 1943 he was moved to the 2nd/2nd Australian General Hospital on the Atherton Tablelands in Northern Queensland where he met up again with his old family friend and mentor Lt Col Ian Wood (qv) OC Medical Division at the hospital, who had been so helpful to him in the later years of his medical course with advice and encouragement following the death of his father. This was a notable time in John's life for here he met a physiotherapist Jan Freeman who was later to become his wife. They married in Melbourne in 1944 and on John's discharge from the army in 1946, following postings to the Heidelberg and Hollywood (WA) Military Hospitals he decided on Dr Ewan Downie's (qv) advice to go to London and study diabetes. He was fortunate in gaining two years valuable experience with Dr RD Lawrence in his diabetic clinic at Kings College Hospital and on his return was appointed Physician-in-Charge of the Diabetic Clinic at Prince Henry's Hospital in 1951, a position he occupied until he retired from the active staff of the hospital in 1973 remaining as a consultant thereafter. He also carried on private practice in diabetes at the same rooms in Spring Street once occupied by his father.
He became well known for his sound management of the diabetic patient and was particularly skilled in the use of Insulin. He introduced the qualitative portion system of dietary management in Melbourne thus doing away with the tedious business of weighing the diet. In the late 1950s he developed an interest in rehabilitation medicine and became a sessional physician with the department of Social Security Rehabilitation Branch under the direction of Dr Dudley Longmuir. His work was based mainly at the Coonac Centre in Toorak. Here in the 1960s the greater part of his work was concerned with the rehabilitation of head injury cases and working in collaboration with the speech therapist Freda Hooper most encouraging results were obtained. A review of 100 cases in 1975 showed for the first time many patients were able to return to useful work who were previously considered hopeless. His interest in rehabilitation medicine led to his appointment as physician to the Royal Talbot General Rehabilitation Hospital. He also attended the Kingston Geriatric Centre where he established a special ward for the care of diabetic patients leading to considerable improvement in their management. In 1977 John was made an FRACP and in 1980 a foundation fellow of the recently established Australian College of Rehabilitation Medicine. John had a keen intellect but a rather retiring disposition. Being the son of such an illustrious father must have made life difficult for him at times as much was expected of him.
His voice was idiosyncratic, a hybrid Anglo-Australian accent, which echoed the precision of his father's diction. He was not above a barbed comment on colleagues as a throwaway line but without malice and recognised as apt. He was a kind and generous person and he and Jan were delightful hosts at their home in South Yarra. Fly-fishing to which he had been introduced by his father as a school boy remained a great joy all his life and he had fished many of the streams in Eastern Victoria sharing a fishing shack on the Delatite with his physician friend Ken Grice. His hobbies included gardening and landscape painting in water colours and he enjoyed his social game of tennis and golf. In the last few years John's health deteriorated and he died on 30 March 1983. His widow has since died. He left two sons, Richard, an ophthalmologist and Peter, a solicitor to carry on the Stawell tradition of four generations in medicine and the law.