William Ernest King was born in Sydney on 17 June 1914. He was the only son of Mr EW King, an importer and successful business man, who moved to Melbourne in the nineteen thirties. Bill King attended Melbourne Grammar School, gaining leaving honours in Greek and Roman history, after which he did his medical course at Melbourne University, graduating in 1937 with honours in all subjects.

His resident years at the Royal Melbourne Hospital were happy ones for himself as well as the students attached to his unit, for he was a born teacher of medicine whose obvious zest for his subject was infectious and enlivened by humour and compassion for his patients.

In 1940 he joined the resident staff of the Children’s Hospital and also enlisted in the Second AIF, so that 1942 found him establishing a base hospital at King’s Hollow about seventeen miles from Port Moresby. Here all his medical skill and organising ability were used to the full in coping with the flow of casualties from the units fighting along Kokoda Trail. For this he was subsequently mentioned in dispatches. He later worked as a physician specialist in the 2/5 Australian General Hospital in New Guinea and Borneo.

Following his discharge from the AIF in 1946 he was appointed first assistant to Dr Ian Wood in the newly created clinical research unit of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. This unit promoted the techniques of aspiration liver biopsy and gastric biopsy in the detailed study of hepatitis and gastric diseases. In 1946 he was awarded one of the first Nuffield Dominion travelling fellowships which he spent with Dr F Avery Jones at the Central Middlesex Hospital, returning to the staff of the Royal Melbourne Hospital as an outpatient physician and, from 1960 until his death, as an inpatient physician.

His interest in pathology and student teaching led to various appointments in the University department of pathology from 1946 onwards. In 1950 he was appointed Stewart Lecturer in Pathology and from 1956, was an examiner in pathology for part one of the MD degree - a post he held until the time of his death. In 1954 in association with Dr RA Joske, he described the occurrence of the LE cell phenomenon in acute viral hepatitis.

His many commitments included membership of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s advisory committee on radioactive isotopes, being lecturer in Singapore for The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, president of the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, censor of the College from 1959 and its representative on the Melbourne Medical Post-Graduate Committee and service on the Victorian branch council of the BMA.

He was strongly supported in his work by his wife Lorna, also a graduate of medicine, and by their two sons, David and Richard, the latter following his father into the medical profession and becoming a Fellow of the College. Bill King was an outstanding physician and teacher, gifted with administrative ability beyond the average, a strong but pleasant personality enlivened by wit and graced with compassion.