Carl Furner was a kind physician, gentle in nature, a man of quiet physical and moral strength. He neither used alcohol nor smoked tobacco. He would say he preferred not to burn his lungs, but put the money into fast cars in which he loved to burn up the road.

Carl came from Goulburn where he attended King's College School. At the University of Sydney while studying medicine, he won a blue for athletics, winning the open mile in 1916 and setting a record that lasted over twenty years. I first met him in a military camp at Rutherford in May 1940. One night he invited me to his home in Newcastle and I was driven in a beautiful Wolseley whose stability he demonstrated by driving at a furious speed. Only two models of this car had been made by Lord Nuffield - one for himself and one for Sir Charles Kingsford Smith from whose widow Carl had made the purchase.

We next met in Malaya. Major Furner served in the 2/4 Casualty Clearing Station; I was a medical officer in the 2/10 Field Ambulance. My most vivid recollection of the man was when I returned to Changi prison in January 1944 with the survivors of F Force whose 7,000 members had done slave labour on the worst section of the Thailand-Burma railway in 1943, half succumbing in a terrible seven months. We were walking skeletons - our clothes in shreds, boots worn out - and Carl presented me with a pair of socks. It may well have been his only pair.

I met him again after the war when I moved to Newcastle in 1953 as a staff physician to Royal Newcastle Hospital where Carl was on the honorary staff. He had come to Newcastle in 1923 after postgraduate studies and was in general practice in Islington where he was joined by his cousin, Curzon Furner, ten years later. The following year, 1934, he took his wife Edith and their young family to England where he studied for a year. He brought back to Newcastle the technique of intratracheal anaesthesia and he and Curzon were much sought after for tonsillectomies and dental extractions performed in the home. Carl left general practice in 1938 and set up consulting rooms in Bank Chambers, Newcastle, a fine sandstone building with views of the northern beaches.

On one occasion when we were returning from a scientific meeting in Queensland by the New England Highway, still a gravel road, the following conversation took place. Edith, leaning back, putting drops in her eye: ‘Carl, just how fast are you going?’ Carl: ‘Only a little over eighty [mph] dear’.

Carl accepted as beneficial to patient and medical practitioner prepayment for medical services in a lodge practice locally organised, for those who wished it. However, he rejected absolutely any system of payment for health care imposed by government.