One afternoon in 1949 Bryan Thomas Dowd was standing at the podium at Grand Rounds in the lecture theatre of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH), expounding the principles of intravenous feeding of a seven year old patient with tetanus. He had accompanied his chief and mentor Professor Lorimer Dods (qv2), who had been summoned from the nearby Children’s Hospital to advise the physicians of this adult hospital specifically on this unfamiliar therapeutic detail. Dowd was the Professor’s right hand man and had worked on the necessary scientific calculations with a perfection that was to characterise most of his activities. Such was the writer’s first glimpse of Bryan Dowd, a man of average height, prematurely bald, reserved in demeanour, but showing an infectious enthusiasm for the subject of his attention. He was to become a trusted friend and wise guide.

Bryan Dowd was born on 13 January 1921 at Randwick, NSW. His father Thomas Peter Dowd was a publican and investor, and his mother, Grace Lillian Ryan, was an accountant and worked as such in her husband’s hotels. Bryan Dowd was educated at Sydney Boys High School where he distinguished himself in English language and literature, and classics, especially Ancient Greek in which he obtained First Class Honours in the Leaving Certificate. He was awarded a Public Exhibition to the University of Sydney, graduated in Medicine in1943 with 2nd Class Honours, and then spent the compulsory year at RPAH as a resident medical officer. The 2nd World War was still in full swing so from 1944-7 he served in the RAAF as a Flight Lieutenant (medical officer). On return to civilian life he took the happy step of starting his paediatric career as a resident medical officer at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children (RAHC) in1948. He next became Medical Registrar and in 1950 was appointed Honorary Assistant Physician at the hospital. He achieved Membership of the RACP in 1951 and was admitted to Fellowship in 1969.

During his undergraduate years and right through his Air Force and earlier Children’s Hospital periods, Bryan Dowd indulged his penchant for English literature and writing, and produced a very large amount of poetry and prose, some of which was published. He was disappointed that Douglas Stewart of The Bulletin did not want to publish his early ‘Twenty Seven Sonnets’ (1940-41) except for one, which Dowd refused, saying it must be all or none. Douglas Stewart wrote: ‘these poems are all well written, so well that one can be sure that, if the writer keeps on , either in verse or in prose , he will always show high quality’

Life was not completely serious in his student days. He and his cousin Patricia Ryan amused themselves once during the early years of the war by sitting in the back row of a cinema showing a war propaganda film and speaking loudly together in guttural German. Judging from his writings at the time they were likely quoting Wilhelm Müller’s Winterreise or Richard Wagner’s Alberich from Der Ring des Nibelungen.

He had been taught music for many years and was a competent pianist. As well as his fondness for Schubert lieder, Mahler and Mozart, he introduced musical jollity into the residents’ common room at the Children’s Hospital by playing specific signature tunes as each member of the resident staff entered.

Around 1950 his friends became aware of a change in his outlook. Life became more serious. Major changes in his professional career were pending. The new Chair of Child Health at Sydney University coupled with the Directorship of the Commonwealth Institute of Child Health was established at the RAHC at Camperdown. Dr Lorimer Dods was appointed to both posts, the first professor of Child Health in Australia. Bryan Dowd was appointed to the position of Medical Officer (Research and Teaching) at the Institute, and was in reality the professor’s deputy. He held the post of Tutor in Clinical Paediatrics and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Furthermore in January 1950 he married Dr Mena Solling whom he had known for some time at the Children’s Hospital, where she worked also, in the Pathology Department. Thus was begun a long and fruitful married partnership which lasted till his death in 1992, and was remarkable to his friends for its closeness, its sharing and its affection. There were two children of the marriage, Philippa born in1951 and Bruce born in 1957. Philippa was a classics scholar who taught Greek at Sydney University and at a private girls’ school She later took a law degree at Sydney University and practised law at the time of her father’s passing. Bruce graduated in nursing at the Prince of Wales Hospital and subsequently became a nurse educator.

Dowd’s engagement with Lorimer Dods in the running of the ward and the teaching of students was harmonious and fruitful. They both shared a meticulous attention to detail and a sense of the dramatic. Case presentations by Dowd were done well and at times enthusiastically. When preparing the presentation of a case involving a child poisoned by eating Angel’s Trumpets from a backyard bush he visited both the child’s home and the Senior Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney to gather relevant information for the meeting.

His friend and colleague, Dr Ferry Grunseit, comments: ‘In his daily work with children and their parents he was always conscious of the need for kindness, humanity and individual attention as well as for excellence in diagnosis and treatment. During one year when all the children who were diagnosed with leukaemia were cared for by the Professorial Unit he made sure that he would interview the parents of each child on admission, counselled them from time to time and always saw them after the child’s death (an inevitable outcome at the time). Though quite shy and retiring socially (except with intimate friends), he rarely failed to reach the children, who loved to talk to him, and the distressed or grieving parents who were obviously comforted by his words’.

His main research interest was in childhood rheumatic fever. He and Dr Helen Walsh set up a clinical research unit at the hospital in the Institute of Child Health where they treated and followed rheumatic fever patients for many years. They were able to confirm the emerging world studies that showed the striking effectiveness of penicillin prophylaxis in the prevention of relapses of acute rheumatic fever. They later produced a booklet for medical students detailing the protocol for diagnosis and management of the disease, which was also in demand by the whole hospital. It was with great satisfaction that in 1958 he was able to report that for the first time in living memory there was no patient in the hospital with acute rheumatic fever. As well as running a general medical clinic at the Children’s Hospital he conducted a small clinical research unit for children with cretinism.

Another important influence in his professional life was Dr Kathleen Winning, a well-known Sydney paediatrician. She encouraged him to join the honorary paediatric staff of the Royal Hospital for Women, Paddington, where he remained from 1951 to 1965. Kate Winning’s great love was the Tresillian Mothercraft Homes run by the Royal Society for the Welfare of Mothers and Babies. Dowd’s association with Tresillian as Honorary Physician from 1950 to 1969 gave much satisfaction to them both. After her retirement as Tresillian’s Medical Director in 1970 Dowd remained with the Society till 1974 as a Council member and for a time as Vice-President.

In 1960 Lorimer Dods retired and his place was filled by Tom Stapleton, a man of considerable acumen and international influence in the paediatric world. While Dowd had been content to play Aaron to Dods’s Moses, because he had admired and revered him, it was not the same situation with Stapleton who brought his own different and idiosyncratic ways to the Chair of Child Health, the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Hospital. However their relationship was good initially, although circumspect, and resulted in a number of excellent Student’s Guides, written by Dowd. These guides dealt with Dosage in Paediatrics, Fibrocystic Disease of the Pancreas, and Feeding of Infants. He also produced A Guide for Parents Whose Children Have Thalassaemia, in English, Greek and Italian. He was the author or co-author of a number of articles published in medical journals, the last in 1974 being ‘Samuel Gee, Aretaeus and the Coeliac Affection’ (with John Walker-Smith).

He was a good mimic and with Lorimer Dods he got his turn of phrase and his tone of voice down to a T. With Tom Stapleton he was less reverent and exaggerated his Englishness to the point of benign caricature. He revelled in his own local argot: ominous was pronounced ‘omnious’ mimicking one of his early surgical tutors who insisted on referring to ‘the omnious signs of peritonitis’. He particularly liked the nickname for the Hunter-Baillie ward, which held the rheumatic fever patients, which had been referred to by a flustered parent as the ‘Rheumatabele’ ward.

Bryan Dowd was retiring in temperament and his handwriting mirrored this – small, neat, meticulous, legible. He did not move easily in a milieu of the famous and the social. As time passed he became more interested in his family life and his intellectual hobbies than in medicine. He purposely passed over all opportunities to rise in seniority in the hospital hierarchy and thus to become head of a medical team. He was such an educated man, full of knowledge and appreciation of music, literature and languages. His friends could not understand why he persistently eschewed overseas travel, to the fons et origo of so much that he admired. He was agnostic in belief, commenting that many great men, such as Socrates, have thought God existed, while many other great men, such as Nietzsche, have thought not. He was sensitive in spirit, feigned strong objection to the avant-garde, and opposed, in fact, the pompous and the boastful. He was at times provoked to crotchetty reactions, but he could be a delightful companion, informed, congenial, interesting.

Dr Grunseit comments again: ‘Dowd had very few illusions about the fallibility of the human species and about its duplicity and preoccupation with vainglorious pursuits. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ was one of his favourite quotes. He might have appeared to be a very serious and sober person to most. Yet his idiosyncratic sense of humour was evident in his daily conversations and asides, as well as in his discussions about music, literature or philosophy, psychology or ethics. He frequented the Wagnerian world as well as the contemporary one alternately and always identified the Meistersingers, the Alberichs or Wotans and Fafners in our midst to the delight of his intimates’

He retired a few years early in 1980, moved to the south coast of New South Wales and continued his life-long interest in music and books. He had a very large collection of records and tapes, which he played regularly. Reading aloud to Mena from their large library became a cherished occupation. His intellectual pursuits had permeated their family life. He recalled with fatherly and paediatric pride an exchange with his 8-year old daughter who had complained of being lonely and wanting a friend. She asked for a cat. He pointed out that she had her little brother, to which she responded ‘But Daddy, what I want is a sibling without the rivalry’.

Bryan and Mena returned to Sydney in 1988 for family reasons, and on 21st August 1992, without any previous warning Bryan was struck down with a massive myocardial infarct and died within minutes. He was cremated privately, without public eulogy. He had made it clear that he did not want a memorial; in keeping with his scepticism about fame. The flag did not fly half mast at his old hospital at Camperdown. Most people did not know for a long time that he had died. His old friends were few and were scattered by then. He was no longer known at those places where he had worked.

This was to a large extent as he had wished it and in fact designed it. But those who were his friends and the many who were influenced by him do remember him as a man sui generis, cultivated, intelligent, competent, humane and a true friend.