Rowden White was born in Tasmania, but his family moved soon to Melbourne where he spent the rest of his life, dying there at the age of eighty-seven years. He was a philanthropist as well as a physician. He gave benefactions during his life to each of the clinical colleges as it was formed. He left a bequest to the Victorian branch of the BMA, of which he had at one stage been secretary, for an oration in memory of Sir Richard Stawell whose assistant he had been for six years and for whom he had a great regard. He made gifts to many other bodies of which he was a member. He had great devotion to his brother, Dr Edward White, who was a senior gynaecologist in Melbourne, and he endowed the AER White and Edward R White Institute at the Royal Women's Hospital. He did not marry, but he was ably supported by a niece, Miss Doris Killburn, who acted as his hostess. As a result of his eminence in the community and his philanthropic work, he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1955 and a Knight Bachelor in 1961. He was dux of Sutherland's College where he matriculated and he went on to Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. He graduated in medicine in 1899 and was granted the MD by examination in 1906. He wrote of himself that he was on the active staff of St Vincent's Hospital for thirty-two years and chairman of the medical staffs of the Children's and St Vincent's Hospitals. With Sir Alan Newton, he founded the Melbourne Permanent Postgraduate Committee and was a founder and councillor of the Association of Physicians of Australasia and later of The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, of which he was a vice-president. In 1962, he was given the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. His service at the University of Melbourne included thirty-two and a half years of teaching medical students, and he was a demonstrator in bacteriology at one stage. He was a member of the standing committee of convocation and was an examiner in medicine of both graduates and postgraduates. For twenty years, having been to World War I, he was a member of the War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal, and also for a time a member of the Final Reference Military Board. His publications can be listed briefly as Acute Pulmonary Oedema and Hypertension and Case of Decerebrate Rigidity. What of the man himself? Those who had not known him at his peak but saw him come back from retirement to St Vincent's Hospital in 1940 because of wartime staff shortages, thought of him as bringing back the era of cupping. Much hilarity was occasioned by his resident applying the cups. The resident also had to go to the city to buy leeches to place on a swollen face. Sir Rowden White would appear in a long coat because `he did not want any germs near him'. One of his patients had to be transferred to a surgical bed because he required a lumbar puncture which had been refused by Sir Rowden White (`no unnecessary investigation, my boy'). Pus was found in the cerebrospinal fluid. Such incidents reflected the changes that had occurred in medicine over forty years. Whilst they necessitated a little subterfuge and occasioned some mirth among the resident medical officers they could not detract from his reputation of service and generous philanthropy.