Reginald Webster was born at Eagleshawk near Bendigo to working class parents in 1889. From the local state school he won scholarships to Wesley College, the Universtiy of Melbourne and Queen's College, graduating MB BS in 1911 with second place in the final honours class list. For the next two years he was resident at the then Melbourne Hospital, being registrar in pathology in the second year, at the end of which he was awarded a doctorate of medicine.

In 1914 he was appointed pathologist to the then Children's Hospital. This was the first such appointment at any hospital in Melbourne and began an association of fifty-nine years which in itself was a unique achievement. It was in a modest laboratory on the old Carlton site, with a staff of only two - a technician and later a biochemist - that he devoted the most active years of his professional life, providing a service in pathology, conducting research and recording his observations.

In the immediate post World War I period infections were one of the major problems to which Dr Webster directed his attention. He wrote a series of original papers dealing with studies in epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis. polio myelitis, serological typing and the mode of transmission of pneumococci. These were followed by work on infantile bacillary dysentery which was the principal study in a thesis for which he was awarded the degree of doctor of science. He took great pride in this degree which was and remains a rare distinction for a medical graduate.

Tuberculosis, then a disease of major importance, next engaged his attention. His inquiry turned on the role of bovine and human bacilli in causing disease. He was the first to isolate tubercle bacilli from fasting gastric contents, a technique which proved to be the most reliable diagnostic method in the early detection of tuberculosis and one which is still used today. This resulted in his being assigned a major undertaking in World War II - the bacteriological examination of all personnel in the armed services in whom a pulmonary lesion had been disclosed in the course of routine thoracic radiography. It also laid the foundation for the successful eradication of tuberculosis in the post-war years. The scientific papers resulting from their work were ultimately collected in a monograph entitled Studies in Tuberculosis, published in 1942.

This intensive service and research between the two World Wars was remarkable given the difficulties under which he worked, so aptly described by Gardiner:

until World War II in fact the hospital's pride in the pathology department was matched by private neglect. The great work of Dr Webster - his investigations into TB, pneumonia and gastroenteritis - was done despite his routine hospital commitments rather than because of the opportunities given him by his position as pathoogist.

Moreover, his modest hospital salary was not sufficient to meet the economic problems of rearing and educating a family so that he was obliged to supplement his income by giving anaesthetics to private patients. After World War II the new Royal Children's Hospital was built. With the expansion of the laboratories in morbid histology, bacteriology and biochemistry Dr Webster realised the administration would be better undertaken by a younger man. Accordingly, after thirty-four years, and with considerable insight and unselfishness, he stepped down as pathologist-in-charge and handed over to the late John Perry (qv 1). However, his professional life and love was still at "the Children's" so he accepted the position of Burton Research Fellow in 1948, which he held until 1973. One of his abiding interests in this period was the museum which bears his name - the Reginald Webster Museum of Paediatric Pathology.

His work was highly regarded by his peers and world authorities in pathology, most of whom did not know him personally. The graduates of today would have difficulty in appreciating Dr Webster's original work as much of it has now been included in the corpus of general medical knowledge. His achievements can be assessed only when examined in the light of medical knowledge of the time, when Virchow's concepts dominated pathology and microbiological knowledge correlated with morbid anatomy. His work was acknowledged by both the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia, to both of which he was elected a foundation fellow, while in 1956 he was president of the section of pathology at the Australian Medical Congress, the highest distinction for a pathologist at that time.

The above represents only part of the individual who witnessed a revolution in medical thought and practice over more than a generation. He was a cultured man who loved music and was an accomplished pianist. In fact at the time of entering the University of Melbourne he was obliged to make the difficult choice between a career in music and medicine, the result being that music remained an absorbing interest and hobby. He delighted in the classics and spent one long vacation as medical student reading Shakespeare. He had a splendid library of classical fiction with the complete works of Dickens, Thackeray and de Balzac and much of that of Hardy, Trollope and Galsworthy. He possessed the outstanding ability to express and communicate his thoughts in lucid, concise, logical writing. The gift of classical English displayed even in his undergraduate examinations remained with him as can be readily verified in all his published works. His writing was often relieved by a delightful and at times whimsical and subtle turn of phrase. Only he could say, as he did in a kindly way at his Mathison Memorial Lecture in 1947, that one of the great problems of the diagnostic radiologist was that, "he was restricted to a silhouette and shackled to a shadow."

Reginald Webster was a quiet retiring man who in spite of his scientific achievements never travelled out of Australia. He was by nature reserved and devoted to his family being well ahead of his time in his conviction that the provision of tertiary education was the best investment he could make on behalf of his three daughters and one son. His personal life was not without its sadness. His first wife Adelaide died in 1927 at the age of thirty-three leaving four young children. His second wife Muriel also died prematurely when fifty-two. This was in 1957, two months after the death of his youngest daughter who was thirty-one. In 1975, just two years after finally severing his commitment to the Royal Children's Hospital, he fell and fractured his femur. This was a great frustration because in spite of a prosthesis he was never able to walk again. At the same time, while he remained alert, his eyesight failed. He died of bronchopneumonia in November 1976.