There were nights in the little West Gippsland town of Neerim South when anxious parents brought ailing children to the only doctors in the village, begging treatment.
Maybe the child needed an appendix removed, or perhaps there’d been an accident requiring surgery.
John Murtagh and his wife Jill, both doctors, had three children of their own, but they never turned anyone away.
Jill and John Murtagh with two of their children, Julie and Paul, outside their country practice in Neerim South in the 1970s.
They simply asked the concerned parents to stay and look after their sleeping children while they drove their little patient to the new bush nursing hospital down the other end of town.
There, John performed the necessary operation while Jill administered the anaesthetic.
Here then, for a decade during the 1970s, was the quintessential country practice.
The Murtaghs brought babies into the world, treated townsfolk and farming families for all manner of illnesses, injuries and trauma, and gentled the elderly and the mortally ill into the beyond.
The practice was attached to their family home.
There was no clocking off. Illness and misadventure have no timetable, and who else was going to save those who needed saving?
The Murtaghs were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Patients who couldn’t find the money for treatment in those pre-Medicare days were never turned away. One fellow arrived at the surgery’s doorstep offering a bag of potatoes in lieu of payment, and it wasn’t unknown for produce from district gardens to appear, Dr Jill Murtagh recalls.
The people of Neerim South and the lovely rolling hills around were blessed.
They could not know just how blessed.
John Murtagh – who started his working life as a high school science teacher before studying medicine – would soon enough become the most celebrated general practitioner in Australia, whose teaching has influenced GPs across the world.
The textbook he would write after he was called from the bush to become a senior lecturer at Monash University, Murtagh’s General Practice, now in its ninth edition, is considered the gold standard for training general practitioners.
Professor John Murtagh with an edition of the textbook that made him globally famous, Murtagh’s General Practice.
It has been translated into 13 languages since its first edition in 1994.
Some years ago, when China’s health authorities began persuading their nation’s doctors to move from traditional medicine to internationally accepted practice, the Mandarin version of General Practice became a standard text.
In his so-called retirement, Murtagh was made an Honorary Professor at Peking University Health Science Centre to go along with a Professorial Fellowship appointment at the University of Melbourne, and an adjunct clinical professorship at the University of Notre Dame.
Professor John Murtagh delivers an oration at Monash University.
Murtagh learned early the virtue of country doctors and the worth of describing in lucid and unambiguous terms the most complex ailments and the practical procedures for dealing with them.
Aged eight in 1944, he contracted poliomyelitis, a viral disease that regularly swept Australia in epidemic proportions, terrifying parents because it could cripple children or kill them.
Generations of Australians were imbued with the knowledge of what it was to survive polio by reading I Can Jump Puddles, the hugely popular memoir of author Alan Marshall.
Marshall, who was raised in the village of Noorat near Terang in Western Victoria, contracted polio at the age of six in 1908, robbing him of the use of his legs.
The Murtagh family lived even further down the country track in the small rural town of Coleraine in far south-west Victoria.
Coleraine, happily, was graced with a country doctor named Bill Tonkin.
His skill at diagnosing and treating just about any illness or medical emergency was considered by the people of the district to verge on the magical.
Dr Tonkin brought young John Murtagh into the world in 1936, and he treated members of the large Murtagh family for many years.
When polio visited, Tonkin splinted young John to prevent his spine from twisting and visited regularly in the four months the boy was confined to bed, often sitting and chatting, proving the art of listening was an important part of any treatment.
The routine introduction of the Salk vaccine for Australian schoolchildren in 1956 was the beginning of the end of polio in Australia.
Pupils at Scotch College in Melbourne lining up for Salk vaccine injections for polio.Credit: THE AGE
It worked spectacularly.
The last recorded case in Australia was in 1972, and in the year 2000, Australia declared the disease had been eradicated.
As one of those children of the 1950s who lined up for the polio jab at school, I would have liked to ask Murtagh his opinion of the 21st century’s anti-vaccination movements, particularly at the top levels of the Trump administration in the US, where vaccine-sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jnr is Secretary of Health.
I suspect the good doctor’s view would have been particularly straightforward, though he was always a modestly spoken man, as I discovered when I first met him six years ago, not having a clue of his fame.
Alas, it is too late.
Emeritus Professor John Murtagh died in the Alfred Hospital last week, aged 89, surrounded by family.
He and Jill raised two boys and three girls, most of whom went into the medical professions.
One of those daughters, Julie Tullberg, a Melbourne sports journalist who lectures at Monash University, remembers walking past an honour board in the Alfred Hospital last week as she hurried to her dying father.
And there displayed on the wall was a list of Robert Power Scholarship winners, with J.E. Murtagh the winner for surgery in 1966. It was the year the young doctor graduated with the first batch of students to study medicine at Monash.
Professor John Murtagh, always a teacher in demand, delivers a lecture at Monash University.
Tributes came from everywhere, which is not surprising – here was a country doctor who in the single year of 2007 was awarded Life Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and Life Fellowship of the World Organisation of Family Doctors in recognition of his contributions to global family medicine.
“For generations of GPs, including mine, Professor Murtagh was the most famous GP we knew,” said Dr Michael Wright, the president of the royal college.
The Coleraine boy had come a long way, though his heart, everyone knew, never really left the bush.
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