Hume Turnbull was born at `Lansdowne', a 150,000 acre Queensland sheep and cattle station where his father, John, was manager and partner. Hume became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School where he was successful in work and play. Apart from service in the AIF in both wars, he spent his whole life in Melbourne while retaining a lifelong interest in the family's property, Lansdowne Pastoral Company Limited, of which he became a director in 1945. His mother, Matilda Jane Woolley, the daughter of a Melbourne merchant and a relative of the celebrated archaeologist Dr Leonard Woolley, bore John five children, Hume being the youngest. His brother Richard became the first chairman of the Victoria Racing Club to own the winner of a Melbourne Cup (Sirius in 1944).

Hume graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1905 with first-class honours, first place in medicine and second place in his year, and proceeded MD in 1907. After being RMO in turn at Melbourne (later Royal) and Children's (later Royal) Hospitals he determined on postgraduate work in England. Cardiology attracted him and he always venerated Sir James Mackenzie - the model of sense and science for Hume all his life. Osler too had his influence and inscribed for him a copy of his monograph on Michael Servetus, the discoverer of the pulmonary circulation in 1553, now in the College library. From Sir Thomas Lewis he learned much in the early days of scientific cardiology. His appointment to the junior staff of the Melbourne Hospital followed soon after his return, and to this hospital he gave his great contributions to clinical cardiology - as practitioner and teacher.

There followed his service to the AIF. He sailed on HMTS Kyarra for Egypt on the staff of 1 Australian General Hospital, which received many of the Gallipoli casualties. Dysentery led to his being invalided to England and a reposting to 1 AGH (by then at Rouen), to meet again Marjorie Cross Yuille, the sister in charge of his ward who had sailed in the Kyarra. They married in 1917. In 1917 and 1918 cardiac problems, organic and functional, were prominent and his experience and clinical knowledge carried over to World War II. As a junior medical consultant his close association with his senior (Sir Henry Maudsley) was of great value to his patients and himself - then and later.

After the War, first an honorary at the Children's Hospital, he moved to the Melbourne as honorary outpatient physician. His great strength was in cardiology and his association with Sir Alan Newton made a formidable and fruitful team in the management of thyroid disease. Teaching for Hume was a duty given with devotion and grace. His constant challenge to the conventional wisdom, his modesty in success and his complete honesty in the inevitable clinical failures were typical of him as a physician and a man.

The Second World War led to his appointment as consultant in medicine in 1942 at Land Headquarters, working in close collaboration and complete harmony with the Director of Medicine, Brigadier Neil Fairley. His advice on standards of treatment and senior clinical appointments were of inestimable value. While on a visit to 2/2 Australian General Hospital in Queensland he received news of the loss of his younger son Henry serving with the RAAF in the North Sea. Characteristically, although personally devastated, professionally he carried on the next morning in his usual effective manner. His post involved constant visits to widely scattered medical units in Australia and New Guinea and the Islands, no easy task for a man in his sixties.

After the War and a return to consultant practice he was very much a senior statesman in cardiology - a doctor's doctor. His interest in the College led to his being a member of the Victorian state committee 1948-54, and a co-opted councillor 1947-49 and 1949-51, having been elected a foundation Fellow in 1938.

Golf, tennis and horse racing were strong interests. While not a particularly gregarious man, he became president of the Melbourne Club in 1947, having been a member for many years. He enjoyed himself there with moderation, as in all things, among his friends. His reserve once overcome, he developed quiet and tenacious friendships, which those chosen counted as a rather precious relationship. Remarkably self-disciplined, undemonstrative, more given to chuckles than laughter, he displayed honesty and integrity, personally and professionally, of the highest order. One could say of him with Talleyrand N'ayez pas de zele.

His home life pursued an even tenor of happiness blest with a devoted, independently minded wife, and four children. Henry's death in the RAAF left an indelible hurt borne with fortitude. His lovely garden in Toorak was a special joy both to him and his wife, an expert gardener. His last two years, with increasing pain and disability from a carcinoma of the prostate, revealed all his finest qualities - faith, resignation, stoicism and unselfish regard for his family supported by his devoted wife. He was a great physician and as a man, rara avis.