A highlight of my career occurred while working at Westmead Hospital. I was blessed by having a superb Registrar serving in the Gastroenterology Department at the time. We admitted a young woman, pregnant with her second child, who had quite abnormal liver tests in the third trimester. She had previously had fatty liver of pregnancy and had lost the first child at an early age with a fulminant illness apparently triggered by a viral infection.

The child had fatty infiltration of liver, kidneys and other organs. Our registrar could barely be restrained as he could see we needed a liver biopsy and we got one, perhaps the longest one I had ever seen! It was classical of acute fatty liver of pregnancy.

Literature of the day indicated that this condition did not recur yet here we could see it had. Tragically the second child experienced the same devastating complication that the first child did and the effect on our patient and her husband was terrible.

This led us to pursue the possible cause of the recurrence and the origin of the disease of the two children. Working with colleagues at the new Westmead Children's Hospital we discovered an enzyme deficiency that when stressed by a pregnancy involving a child also carrying the affected gene led the mother to develop an acute fatty liver.

Those children were at risk themselves. Armed with that knowledge the parents were empowered to embark on a third pregnancy with appropriate monitoring of mum and the fetus and to everyone's delight an unaffected baby was born to delighted and perfectly well parents. Knowledge was power and it led to absolute joy.

Experience with a peer that deeply affected me

Working for Alan McGuinness, or Mac, was always rewarding, terrifying, funny and deeply affecting. He was senior Physician at Sydney Hospital when I was training as a student and then for three years post graduation.

As a student the experience of sitting in a tutorial room with a man who seemed to know everything about every possible issue affecting the patient that you were supposed to know all about was humbling and depressing at the same time. How could he know so much?

On ward rounds, I was struck by the absolute trust patients had in this man who at times could appear to be so gruff with the individual patient. How could he get away with that brusqueness? In this day and age we immediately think that the sort of behaviour he displayed would be seen as inappropriate, discriminatory, belittling, yet patients trusted him implicitly and enjoyed communicating with him.

As his registrar, I learned more about him and came to appreciate and love the man for his total commitment to medicine and his patients. What we did not see as students was the amount of time he spent each day getting to know his patients as people and their concerns as totally relevant to what they were now experiencing, whatever the medical diagnosis. Mac was the classic physician who knew himself and knew his patients.

His tirades on ward rounds in front of a cast of dozens it seemed, over tests not ordered or possible diagnoses not considered by a registrar were compensated for by amazing conversation on the way to the car and then walking beside the car along the road at the back of Sydney Hospital towards St Mary's Cathedral.

He shared personal thoughts, concerns for my wife of 12 months and medicine. Medicine provides such amazing opportunities to meet and work with and learn from great human beings. Would Mac get away with his approach to patients today. I know he would, because he knew and was loved by his patients.