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College Roll Bio
Daly, Harry John
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Qualifications
CMG (1966) MB ChM Syd (1918) DA Eng (1934) MRACP (1942) FRACP (1948) FFARCS (1948) Hon FFARCS (1962) (Hon) FFARACS (1970) FFRACS (1962) (Hon) FFARACS (1970) (Hon) FRACS (1973)
Born
03/08/1893
Died
19/06/1980
Harry Daly was born at Glebe New South Wales, the only son of Henry and Victoria Daly, respectively of Dublin and of Whitegate, County Clare, Ireland. His parents had migrated to Australia where his father in 1891 was entrusted with the installation and care of the clock and chimes of the GPO tower in Sydney. The young Harry used to enjoy accompanying his father up the five hundred steps to wind up the machinery, which his father did every day until 1930. Harry had his primary education with the Samaritan Nuns at Glebe and his secondary education at St Ignatius' College, Riverview (1908-13). He commenced medicine at the University of Sydney in 1914 and in 1915 volunteered for army service in World War I, but, like many another medical student of those years, was required to finish the medical course before formally entering the army. He graduated in 1918, almost coincidentally with the end of the war, and spent the next two years as RMO at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.
In 1921 Harry married Jean Edmunds, daughter of the late Mr Justice Edmunds, and commenced general practice at Haberfield New South Wales. Shortly thereafter he was appointed honorary physician to Lewisham Hospital, Sydney. As was usual at that time in this capacity he was required to give many anaesthetics and his work with the urologist Dr Harry Harris led to both a life-long friendship and Harry's specialisation in anaesthesia which took place in 1928 and was the first such in NSW since the brief career of RH Todd in 1889. In 1929 Harry's choice of career was confirmed by attendance at the meetings of the first Section of Anaesthetics ever to be included in the programme of the BMA (Australasia) Congress. Present at this Congress in Sydney were those from other states with the same special interest who were later the founders of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists and of the Faculty of Anaesthetists RACS and with whom, ever afterwards, Harry maintained correspondence.
It is perhaps appropriate at this point to mention the value of the many files which Harry Daly kept which are now part of the archives of the Faculty of Anaesthetists. Letters from anaesthetists all over the world; letters, minutes, agenda, programmes connected with the Australian Society and the Australasian Faculty; illustrated brochures of new apparatus; reprints of articles on new techniques and anaesthetic agents from journals; appropriate material relating to early postgraduate teaching and the introduction of the Diploma of Anaesthesia at the University of Sydney. Even the examination papers from the first two diploma examinations were asked for, received, and saved. Harry's files are virtually a pictures of anaesthesia and its development spanning over thirty years. It is little wonder that Harry Daly was a fountain of interesting information and wise advice to those who came later to the specialty.
Following the Congress the first state Section of Anaesthesia was formed within the New South Wales branch of the BMA with Harry Daly as its first secretary. At the BMA Congress in Hobart, Tasmania in 1934, Harry Daly was invited to join the small select band of seven which sat round a table at Hadley's Hotel and voted to form the Australian Society of Anaesthetists. In 1946 he became the third president of the Society, when it had some fifty members, and it was a source of great gratification to him that during his lifetime membership grew to over one thousand anaesthetists. In 1935 Harry and Jean made an extended overseas tour, during which, to judge by Harry's diary, they visited every noted anaesthetist of the era. This could be said to have had an impact on anaesthesia in Australia even to the present day. At the time it meant introduction of new agents and techniques; later it had effect through correspondence with those he had met, introductions given to other anaesthetists who travelled, invitations to younger anaesthetists to work in overseas departments who have returned, in their turn, to teach and train.
Upon deciding to specialise in anaesthesia Harry Daly was appointed as honorary anaesthetist to Lewisham Hospital, resigning his position as honorary physician. In 1936 he was appointed as honorary anaesthetist to Sydney Hospital, and in 1937 to St Vincent's Hospital. During all these early years he lectured for the NSW Post-Graduate Committee in Medicine on anaesthesia, and when the postgraduate hospital was established in 1938 he resigned from a brief period as a neurosurgical anaesthetist at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital to become one of the two visiting specialist anaesthetists at Prince Henry, as the postgraduate hospital was renamed. His contribution to formal postgraduate teaching was large, and he was deeply involved in the preparation of regulations, curricula, courses and examination for the first Diploma of Anaesthesia instituted in Australia at Sydney University in 1944. Harry excelled as a teacher in these courses, and I can certainly vouch for his skill as a clinical tutor. It was also of interest during clinical tuition to find that almost every piece of equipment used had been designed by someone Harry had met and with most of whom he still corresponded. Upon conclusion of courses and examination Harry did not forget his pupils, for it was quite common for young diplomates, struggling to establish practice, to find that they had been recommended to particular surgeons by Harry Daly. Unlike some others in those early years, Harry was always anxious to extend the numbers practising anaesthesia as a specialty, and his help and encouragement were invaluable in recruitment.
With the end of World War II and the resumption of meetings of the Society came anxieties for the new president and his executive, for a Diploma of Anaesthesia had also been instituted by the University of Melbourne, and a pan-Australian diploma became the Society's aim. To Harry Daly, as president, fell the task of organising an approach to the RACP and RACS regarding foundation of a conjoint diploma issued by both colleges, occurred in England. This was unfortunately found to be impossible.
In 1934 when the English diploma was inaugurated, several Australian anaesthetists, of whom Harry Daly was one, had this diploma conferred upon them without examination. Similarly, when in 1948 the English Faculty of Anaesthetists was established within the Royal College of Surgeons, foundation fellowship was conferred upon eight distinguished Australian anaesthetists. Harry, always aware of international relationships and their value, decided that such an honour demanded his presence at its formal bestowal in London. He was charged by the executive of the Australia Society with the task of investigating the foundation of the English Faculty, with a view to solving the Australian diploma problem. Whilst in London he consulted with the dean and board of the English Faculty; with the president of the College and some of its councillors, and attended a Faculty examination. Impressed, he returned to Australia with the intention of promoting the formation of an Australian faculty. His ship was delayed in Adelaide and he was able to have a meeting with Sir Ivan Jose, an RACS councillor, who had just returned from London, and who, knowing of the Society's problem, had also studied the English solution. From this meeting stemmed the Society's approach to the RACS council where Sir Ivan added his support. Thus Harry Daly was a vital element in the foundation of the Australian Faculty. He was a member of the negotiating committee; of the Interim Board of Faculty, and was the first vice dean of the Faculty upon election of its first board in 1954. When the first dean became ill, Dr Daly was the acting dean until his resignation, because of his own health, in 1955.
The contributions of Harry Daly to anaesthesia have been recognised by the conferring in 1969 of the Australian Faculty's highest award, the Orton Medal; in 1962 he had the honour of admission to Honorary Fellowship of the English Faculty, an honour rarely conferred and limited to fifteen fellows within the Commonwealth at any one time. Honorary Fellowship of the Australasian Faculty was conferred upon him in 1970, at the first international meeting organised by the Faculty, and in 1973 he was the first anaesthetist to be admitted to Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. The Australian Society of Anaesthetists honoured Harry Daly with life membership and its privileges and he was from 1935 an honorary member of the Liverpool (UK) Society of Anaesthetists.
When in 1966 the services to medicine and anaesthesia over thirty-five years by Dr Daly were recognised by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, with his admission to the Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, there was general great pleasure, not only in Australia but throughout the world of anaesthetists, as the correspondence shows. In writing of the contributions of Harry Daly to education in anaesthesia in Australia, and his help to younger anaesthetists, together with his personality and dedication which enhanced the status of a young specialty, his clinical contributions must not be forgotten. He was the first anaesthetist in Sydney in the early 1930s to use the new gas agent, cyclopropane, and his pleas to the government for continued import of the gas during World War II make interesting reading.
World War II, in 1942, brought to Sydney Dr Lewis Wright, consultant to Squibb & Co, whom Harry had met in 1935, to Sydney, bearing with him, for his friend, supplies of the new curare relaxant, Intocostrin, prepared by Squibb. Relaxant technique with anaesthesia had been introduced in that same year by Dr Harold Griffith of Canada, another friend of Dr Daly, and Dr Wright also brought publications of its use. Persistance and pleas by Harry Daly over the next three years finally resulted in the first use of relaxant adjuvants to anaesthesia in Australia by Harry and his partner Stuart Marshall in 1945. Neither Harry or Stuart, nor the surgeons at that time, had realised that this introduction was a turning point for the specialty in Australia. For this careful and successful trial alone, Harry Daly, who had gained the requisite physiological knowledge in study for membership of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians by examination in 1942, twenty-four years after graduation, should be revered. Fellowship of the College, conferred in 1948, was well deserved. There can be few who have altered, bravely and with a new and potentially dangerous technique, the history of a specialty in medicine in Australia. In 1949, as a result of this work, Harry Daly received a Rockefeller Grant to read a paper on 'Experiences with curare in Australia' at a meeting of the American Medical Association in Atlantic City.
All of the foregoing, though suitably adulatory, does not convey Harry Daly as Harry Daly. He was a warm friend with a delightful, ironic sense of humour who displayed interest in the most varied aspects of one's life. He had a wide knowledge of an extraordinary range of subjects; botany, marine life, architecture, Australian history, to name a few. It was difficult to remember the Harry of one's diploma course when being shown rare plants in the garden, or accompanying him to the beach at Bawley Point to watch the (named) penguins and the art of rock fishing; but after such experience it was not hard to see why one of his lectures, to an erudite society in America, had had as its subject the Australian beach worm, and the art of catching it. Accompanying the lecture was a specimen, in a specially blown glass tube one and a half metres long. Harry Daly's memorials lie deep in the history of anaesthesia in Australia; the first diploma course, the foundation of the Society of Anaesthetists, the foundation of the Faculty of Anaesthetists. Concretely they exist in the Harry Daly Fellowship, granted by the Faculty; the Harry Daly Museum, Department of Anaesthetics, University of Sydney; the many references to his clinical work in Australian journals and his biographies in books on the history of Australian anaesthesia and anaesthetists. He was a great and good man who by his personality and broad international views encouraged many to the challenge of a new and struggling specialty, and lived to see his dream become reality.
Author
G WILSON
References
Med J Aust
, 1981,
1
, 488-9;
Anesth Analg
, 1971,
50
, 374-5,; Wilson, G,
Fifty years: the Australian Society of Anaesthetists
, Syd, 1987
Last Updated
May 30, 2018, 17:35 PM
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