History and the half-dead disease. Campbell oration 1972.

IT is a very great honour, especially for a Queensman, to be invited to give this lecture, and( I am most grateful to the Committee of the Robert Campbell Trust for the invitation. It came to me as a complete surprise because I have never had any reason to suppose that r might be privileged to join the distinguished company of former orators. They comprise a star-studded honours list of a league unfamiliar to me, and I know only too well that I cannot bring to this occasion the academic attainment or the erudition of those who have entertained this Society since 1922 with descriptions of brilliant original work. Most of my tale concerns the deeds, sometimes the misdeeds, of other people. Robert Campbell died ten years before I became a medical student, but his name is legendary in Ulster's medical history, and I have sometimes wondered what exceptional virtues, combined in him, urged his colleagues to endow this memorial. A colleague has been defi.ned as a person utterly devoid of talent who in some unaccountable way is successful in doing the same job as one's own. Obviously there was no such cynicism in the minds of Robert Campbell's contemporaries, but to inspire the affection and regard underlying this Trust he must have been much more to them than just a talented: teacher and pioneer of paediatric surgery. The explanation given by another membeil of that great family, the late W. S. Campbell, is that although he was a man of few words, he was capable of warm-hearted eloquence when he chose, and evidently he inherited the honesty, clear vision and integrity of moral purpose characteristic of his great-uncle, the first Reverend Robert Campbell. T-his remrkable man, known countrywide around Templepatrick as "honest Bob", was willing to defy the wrath of Henry Cooke