Skip to main content
About
About the RACP
What is a physician or paediatrician?
Membership
College structure
Board and governance
College Council
Committees
Accreditation
Ethics
Consumer Advisory Group
Special Interest Groups
The ROC
Multi-factor authentication
Our heritage
Get involved
Careers at RACP
Medical positions
MyRACP
Congress 2024
News and Events
News
The President's Message
RACP 2024 Elections
Media releases
Events
Congress 2024
Expressions of Interest
RACP in the media
COVID-19
Quick facts
Policy and Advocacy
Represent your profession
Policy and Advocacy Priorities
Policy and Advocacy Library
CPAC reports
Evolve
Voice to Parliament
Make It The Norm
Division, Faculty and Chapter Priorities
Regional Committee Priorities
RACP Foundation
Donate to Foundation
About us
Research Awards and Career Grants
College and Congress prizes
Division, Faculty and Chapter Awards & Prizes
Regional Awards & Prizes
Indigenous Scholarships & Prizes
International Grants
Student Scholarships & Prizes
Terms and Conditions
Our recipients
Contact us
Toggle mobile menu
Search
Home
Become a Physician
Trainees
Fellows
Overseas specialists
About
About the RACP
What is a physician or paediatrician?
Membership
College structure
Board and governance
College Council
Committees
Accreditation
Ethics
Consumer Advisory Group
Special Interest Groups
The ROC
Multi-factor authentication
Our heritage
College Roll
College timeline
History of Medicine Library
Past office bearers
Get involved
Careers at RACP
Medical positions
MyRACP
News and Events
Expressions of Interest
Policy and Advocacy
RACP Foundation
Wellbeing
Contact us
Pomegranate Health
Congress 2024 Dashboard
Close menu
▲
Search
Open section menu
▼
About
About the RACP
What is a physician or paediatrician?
Membership
College structure
Board and governance
College Council
Committees
Accreditation
Ethics
Consumer Advisory Group
Special Interest Groups
The ROC
Multi-factor authentication
Our heritage
College Roll
College timeline
History of Medicine Library
Past office bearers
Get involved
Careers at RACP
Medical positions
MyRACP
Open section menu
▼
College Roll Bio
McQueen, Ewen Garth
Share
Qualifications
VRD (1965) CBE (1982) MB BS Syd (1940) MRACP (1949) MRCP (1949) FRACP (1959) PhD NZ (1960) FRCP (1970)
Born
09/01/1917
Died
02/06/1997
Garth McQueen was born in Ashfield, New South Wales. His father, Dr Neil McQueen, was a general practitioner who had entered medicine late after retirement from a school headmastership. Garth was educated at the King’s School where he was Dux and qualified in medicine from the University of Sydney with Honours. After residency at RPAH he volunteered for service in 1941 and joined the Royal Navy as a medical Officer. He saw action, both in the Mediterranean and later in the Pacific. During a posting in England he met and married in 1944 Marion Going, daughter of the Reverend Claude and Muriel Going, then a WRNS Officer and an Oxford graduate. After the war he served in the RNZVR until 1969, reaching the rank of Surgeon Commander. Following postgraduate study in Birmingham, he became first assistant in the Department of Medicine in the University of Queensland, and there developed an interest in hypertension (particularly renal) and its treatment. In 1954 he moved to Dunedin as Senior Medical Research Officer in the Department of Medicine in the University of Otago, under Professor (later Sir) Horace Smirk (qv). He was appointed to the post of Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology, within the Department of Medicine, in 1958 and to a personal chair of Clinical Pharmacology in 1971, in the recently formed Department of Pharmacology. He was Director of the MRC Toxicology Research Unit from 1967 until his retirement in 1987 and was Honorary Consultant Toxicologist to the Health Department.
His contributions were immense. Based on his early interest in the kidney and hypertension, he organised the setting up of dialysis facilities in Dunedin. Some of this work involved cases of overdosage or poisoning and this went hand-in-hand with his increasing interest in drug concentrations in blood, protein-binding of drugs and drug interactions. In 1965, with Malcolm Watt and Marshall Luke, he as instrumental in setting up the New Zealand Committee on Adverse drug Reactions and, with it, the Adverse Drug Reactions Register in Dunedin, which he initially ran single-handedly and which developed into the Centre for Adverse Reactions to Medicines, which reports to the Ministry of Health. The New Zealand Intensive Medicines Monitoring Programme is another unique drug safety initiative that started through his work and is admired worldwide. The Centre has for many years had the status of a WHO Collaborating Centre.
Garth played a major part in forming the MRC Standing Committee on Therapeutic Trials and was its first chairman; he also helped establish the Drug Assessment Advisory Committee. In 1964, in a joint initiative with Dunedin Public Hospital, he set up a National Poisons Information Centre to help answer inquiries (often urgent) regarding toxic substances. After the Parnell incident in 1973 (when a ship arrived with leaking containers of a chemical), the Department of Health requested that the Centre be expanded to include a National Hazardous Chemicals Information Centre and this became operational in 1979. He was one of the founders of the New Zealand Branch of the newly formed Australasian Society for Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology.
He served the College as a member of the Dominion Committee, 1966-68 and as Chairman of the Specialist Advisory Committee in Clinical Pharmacology, NZ, 1976-8.
One long-time colleague remarked that Garth had a gift for getting things done without upsetting other people. He could be blunt but had a lively sense of humour. He gave himself without stinting and this was undoubtedly the reason why the Adverse Reactions Register and the Intensive Medicines Monitoring Programme were so successful, much envied by other countries. According to outside information, he spent a great deal of personal time and effort in discussing, by letter or often by telephone, drug-related inquiries from doctors and lay people from all over the country. He was held in great respect throughout New Zealand and Australian medicine and in WHO drug-monitoring circles.
In addition to his administrative work, his teaching in pharmacology and his clinical and laboratory research, he was a highly competent physician and bedside teacher, held in affection and great respect by patients, students, junior staff and colleagues. After his retirement, he was for a time visiting Physician to the Balclutha Hospital and worked for eight years as medical officer to the Otago Blood Collection Service. He also established the Otago Medical Research Foundation Auxiliary, a group of about one hundred elderly people who were willing to take part in research into the health of the elderly; he ran the Auxiliary for eleven years until deafness made this difficult, and he is reported always to have been the first to volunteer for each new study. He was active to the end, for instance using his knowledge to warn about the dangers of cannabis. As recently as 1993 he co-authored a small book, Pesticide Perils, Menace or Myth? His literary skills encompassed short stories and a privately published autobiography. In 1982, for services to medicine and the community, Garth was awarded the CBE.
Garth was an active sportsman: he won a University Blue for hockey and was a skier, skin-diver, all-weather yachtsman and long-serving patron of Otago University Ski and Yachting Clubs. He had a long and happy marriage to Marion and at the time of his death was survived by her, their four children and nine grandchildren. His daughter, Fiona, became a Fellow of the RACP, and her sister, known as Cilla, a widely known and accomplished poet. Garth’s many contributions to New Zealand medicine will always be appreciated.
Author
FO SIMPSON
References
NZ Med J, 1997 110 301; Otago Daily Times June 7,1997, Australian 15 July 1997, Munk’s Roll X 320-2
Last Updated
May 30, 2018, 17:37 PM
Close overlay