Wilfred Evans came from a Welsh family which earlier had been famous for its bone setters and later had produced Hugh Owen Thomas of Thomas splint fame. His father Richard was an apothecary who came to Australia in the late 1800s. He settled in Cooma, New South Wales where he became editor of the Monaro Mercury. Wilfred was born in Cooma, the fourth of five children. He received his early education there, then at the Scots College, Sydney, and graduated MB from Sydney University in 1914, top of his year with first-class honours and the University Medal. After a brief residency at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital he joined the Australian Imperial Force in 1915 and was posted to the 3 Light Horse Brigade, at that time on Gallipoli. He served with the mounted troops until the end of the Middle East Campaign and saw a lot of action. He was four times mentioned in dispatches and was awarded the Military Cross. He was discharged with the rank of major.

After demobilisation in 1920 Evans entered general practice in Waverley and in 1922 became an assistant physician at Sydney Hospital. In 1928 he qualified for Membership of the Royal College of Physicians of London and returned to Australia to take up consulting practice. He was a competent and popular general physician with a reputation for commonsense and humanity, a good all-rounder with a special interest in cardiology. In 1937 he was appointed as honorary physician to Sydney Hospital. He became a foundation Fellow of The Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1938.

Wilfred Evans' consulting and hospital careers were interrupted in 1940 when he again joined the Australian Army Medical Corps. He was declined for overseas service but served at Headquarters in Melbourne as ADGMS. He was in charge of medical standards, medical transport, boards and invaliding. He was also involved in the repatriation hospitals being built in the various states. He found this a particularly arduous task but had exactly the right stubborn streak of temperament and in his dealings with architects, builders, engineers and treasury always insisted that clinical considerations came first. He was discharged in 1945 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel and returned to consultant practice.

In this later phase of his career he was much involved with the tortuous politics of Sydney Hospital and was chairman of the honorary medical staff in 1949. He became the senior physician at this hospital, the Repatriation Hospital, Concord and the Prince Henry Hospital.

My personal acquaintance with Wilfred was over the five years at Sydney Hospital immediately following the War. He was a spare man of medium build with a jerky, bustling walk and a quick bird-like way of fixing his attention. He was a good clinical teacher with unbounded energy and an infectious enthusiasm for learning. His ability to communicate this enthusiasm was his strength as much or more than the substance of his teaching. He was totally without guile and had no sense of self importance. He approached everyone as though they were his equal and would consult with the most junior house staff as with a senior colleague. His wartime service occupied a large part of his career. He retired from the active staff of Sydney Hospital in 1949 after only seven interrupted years as an inpatient physician.

Bill Evans' interests outside medicine were golf and tennis and he was a knowledgeable gardener. He owned a house at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains and with his family spent a lot of leisure time there. After the 1939-45 War he had a small property at Exeter. In 1931 he married Heather Ross, a medical graduate and a member of an extraordinary medical family. Her two brothers and two of her four sisters were doctors and distinguished ones at that. Wilfred had three children, a daughter who graduated in law and two sons, both Sydney Hospital trainees. One son is a neuropathologist and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia and the other, a physician-endocrinologist, is a Fellow of this College. Wilfred Evans died in Sydney Hospital where he had been a student, in 1957, after a brief illness. He was still in active practice.