Alex began the medical course at Melbourne Unversity in 1928 and graduated in 1933. His results were always in the top ten percent of the year and his final results made him certain of a post as RMO at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He had, however, come to the notice of the Mr Fay McLure, a senior surgeon at the Alfred Hospital, who thought he would make a first-class surgeon and encouraged him to do his residency at the Alfred Hospital. At the end of this year as a junior resident he had doubts about whether he wanted to be a surgeon, so he decided to broaden his experience before making up his mind. He therefore did a year in 1935 as RMO at the Women's Hospital and another in 1936 at the Children's Hospital. During these years he decided he would prefer medicine to surgery so he studied for the MD and passed the examination in 1936. During his RMO years he had also managed to fit in periods as a GP locum, including three months as flying doctor in Queensland, in order to get GP experience and earn money to go overseas. By then he was determined to become a consulting physician.

In March 1937 he married Dr Dorothy Gepp and they both went to England. It was during their weeks at sea on that trip that he made up his mind to specialise in psychiatry and decided that, to prepare properly for his career, he should first fully establish himself as a qualified consultant general physician by getting his MRCP, and then brush up his neurology at Queen Square and study psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. Having done just that, he returned to Australia in 1939 and started back in general practice, but this was soon interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. His distinguished war service in the AAMC in the Middle East, Tobruk, New Guinea and Australia as a lieutenant colonel, consulting psychiatrist to the Australia Military Forces and his post-war preparation for the government of Australia of a survey report on Mental Heath in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea were recognised by his OBE awarded in 1967. His first publications in 1942 and 1943 dealt with psychiatric casualties in soldiers in Tobruk and New Guinea. He was awarded the Stawell Prize in 1944 for his essay on "Psychiatric aspects of the present war", and he delivered the Beattie-Smith Lectures at Melbourne University in 1945 on "Pyschiatric reactions of soldiers".

When demobilised he went back to private general practice with one session a week for psychiatric patients; but his fame as a psychiatrist grew so fast that these patients soon took up all his time for private practice and his general practice had to stop. The rest of his time was taken with public hospital appointments. However, he never felt himself to be above or even apart from general practice and general medicine. His unusual path through three different junior RMO years, general practice, general medicine, neurology and war medicine to psychiatry ensured that his psychiatric diagnoses and treatments were based on the widest possible knowledge of physical diseases; and he rightly attributed his uncanny ability to distinguish the physical from the psychiatric components of his patients' symptoms and give appropriate treatment for both to this general knowledge. His advice to aspiring psychiatrists was to become qualified general physicians first; unfortunately many did not take it.

Alex became very widely known not only in his home state, but throughout Australia and New Zealand. He was highly respected by all his professional colleagues, and was sought out by postgraduate students of psychiatry for his wealth of knowledge, and, what is much more rare, his wisdom and his graceful manner of imparting knowledge. He was the sort of psychiatrist to whom psychiatrists took themselves or their relations in need of psychiatric advice, than which there can be no higher praise.

He was active, not only clinically, but also in the professional organisations to which he belonged. He was active in the foundation of the Australasian Association of Psychiatrists in the 1940s and was for a time its federal secretary, served for a number of terms as a federal councillor and was its federal president in 1959. He was a strong supporter of the transformation of the Association into the (now Royal) Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 1963 and was elected a foundation fellow. He was a member of the Victorian State Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians from 1947 to 1958 and was an editorial representative for the College's publication, Australasian Annals of Medicine from 1954 to 1962. He was active in the affairs of the Australian Medical Association, served for a number of years as a Victorian Councillor, was Victorian President in 1965 and was honoured by the award of its fellowship in 1972.

He was honorary psychiatrist to the Royal Melbourne Hospital for twenty years form 1946 to 1966 and on his retirement from that position he became honorary psychiatrist to the Austin Hospital for a further three years. He was also for a number of years visiting psychiatrist to the Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg and played a major role with a number of other colleagues in establishing the Cato Chair of Psychiatry at Melbourne University. He was also lecturer in normal psychology at Melbourne University. Alex was unwilling to retire from active clinical practice and always expressed the wish that he would die in harness, but this was not to be. He will be remembered by generations of psychiatrists as a distinguished, wise, modest friend and colleague.