Ernie Beech was a physician of peculiarly Australian type, imbued with a gifted medical versatility such as could never be exhibited today because of the complexity, rigidity and loss of innocence in medicine. Ernest Robert Beech was born in Adelaide on 12 November 1908. He was educated at Pulteney Grammar School, whence as dux he gained a Church Schools Scholarship to Saint Peter's College. A Government bursary took him on to the Adelaide University from which he graduated MB BS in 1932. On the advice of a friend who was working there, he came straight on to the Perth Public Hospital being a resident medical officer in 1933, and medical registrar in 1934. He then spent two years in England working both in Queens Square and at the Royal Chest Hospital in London, gaining his MRCP just before his return to Australia in 1936.
For the next nine years he was in general practice in the semi rural suburb of Guildford, some nine miles from Perth. Here he was in partnership with the late Eric Kyle, a surgeon who was similarly trained in the overseas tradition of the day. The two of them formed a team with Beech as the physician anaesthetist. His superb competence was attributable to instruction from the doyen of Perth anaesthetists, the late Dr Gilbert Troup, and to the fortuitous circumstance of the outbreak of war which left him in Perth as one of the few specialist and tremendously called-upon anaesthetists. He worked in association with the lone neurosurgeon James P Ainslie acting in this regard also as neurologist. In 1948, he was appointed president of the Australian Association of Anaesthetists and in 1953, a foundation fellow of that College. Only in 1950 did he relinquish his position of anaesthetist to the Royal Perth Hospital. On his return to Perth Hospital in 1938, he was appointed clinical assistant to the late Bruce Hunt (qv I), working both in general medicine and the favourite hunting ground of diabetes. In 1950, he was appointed visiting physician to the hospital but this formidable commitment did not prevent his continuation as senior physician to the 200 bed Fremantle Hospital from 1946 to 1965, and as visiting neurologist to the Children's Hospital from 1951 to 1958.
It was as senior physician and neurologist to the Royal Perth Hospital that in 1961, Ernest Beech presented himself for examination for entry to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. That great champion of the College, Bruce Hunt, persuaded him to do so and forever frowned upon and campaigned against those of his MRCP invested colleagues who sought membership by other than the gladiatorial means. Not surprisingly Beech was successful in what must have been a most interesting and gentlemanly encounter with the censors, played out no doubt under the best Marquis of Queensbury rules. Ten years later, he was elected to fellowship. Beech was always immensely proud of this honest endeavour, as completely free from humbug and false dignity as was the man himself.
In the ten years prior to his retirement from general medicine in 1966, he was deeply involved in the medical affairs of the hospital and the profession. Chairmanship of the most influential committees at Royal Perth, presidency of the local branch of the Australian Medical Association, and involvement with affairs of the state drew deeply upon his time. In 1968, when he finally retired as senior neurologist he became co-ordinator of the Department of Radiology, and following this served insatiably as an assistant neuropathologist. Most of this incredible catalogue of hospital service was undertaken under the old 'honorary' system to which Ernest Beech was selflessly committed.
A delicately built, short man he had about him an almost elfin air of puckish good humour. His smile was friendly, sometimes roguish with the lips finely retracted in mild risus revealing startlingly small white teeth. Highly intelligent, competitive, sometimes a little flashy in style, he was deeply read in many branches of medicine. Much of his diagnostic skill rested upon an almost computerised capacity for concatenation of symptoms and signs which adapted itself to the denouement of the neurological mystique. He was not much given to the painstaking documentation of history, and his manner at times would seem to flit about as he sought the important diagnostic clues which permitted a reasonable synthesis. Behind this seemingly unsystemised style was a wealth of general practice, a sound training in general medicine, an encyclopaedic recall for case complexities and precedents and the subtle integration of physician, neurologist and anaesthetist.
To his registrars, if inclined toward internal medicine in any of its forms, he was immensely generous of time, tutelage and patronage although he was sometimes brusque and seemingly callous of manner, these attributes could be readily understood in the observance of his intense and penetrating intellect. To see the diminutive Beech in contest with the massive Hunt was to conjure up visions of Thor and Loki.
Family life was of immense import. To a man of simple tastes, the company of his wife and children, his passion for fishing and his all consuming commitment to medicine ensured a rich endowment and reward. His death in 1976 from an upper gastric neoplasm was relatively swift and borne with characteristically quiet and contemplative fortitude. A whole retinue of Perth physicians now approaching their own retirement, look back to him with gratitude for those old stirrings of intellectual excitement in the craft and art of medicine.