Obituary: Cecil Lewis

Cecil Lewis

* Professor Cecil Lewis, founding dean of Auckland Medical School. Died aged 90.

Professor Cecil Lewis headed the University of Auckland's new medical school in its founding years from 1965 to 1974, setting its guiding principles.

When Lewis moved to New Zealand from Perth in 1966 there was no building on the Grafton site. Eight months later, when the Cabinet was still mulling over the working drawings, Lewis was complaining: "It's very frustrating at the moment - I am the medical school here, as it were."

In fact people like Sir Douglas Robb, the pioneering heart surgeon and university chancellor, had already been pushing for at least eight years for a second medical school in New Zealand.

In 1968, when Lewis poured the first hopper of concrete into the foundations, it was estimated that the country would need 400 more doctors by 1971.

Otago Medical School was producing only 100 a year and for many years Auckland had taken a number of final year Dunedin students because of shortages of patients available to the southern school for clinical training.

Professor Lewis, an approachable Welshman with degrees in science, medicine and surgery from the University of Wales, had graduated as a master of surgery in 1952 and lectured at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary. He enjoyed telling New Zealanders that, being from Cardiff, "I know every blade of grass on Cardiff Arms Park where we scored the try in 1905."

His job in Auckland, similar to his previous work in Perth while professor of surgery at the new medical school at the University of Western Australia, included setting the curriculum for the new school and the selection criteria for its students.

The school's first dean decided that applicants would not be automatically excluded if they had not previously taken science subjects. And he aimed for a gradual transition from study to professional practice without a massive punitive examination at the end.

He defended a less rigid system, arguing that both general practitioners and specialists had to be of the highest intelligence. Were his critics really suggesting, he asked, a "two-tier admission in medicine ... a group of racehorse intelligence to man the future specialties and a cart-horse variety for family practice?"

He was said to have taken a pay drop to take on the Auckland medical school appointment and was not as certain on some subjects as he was on medicine.

Lecturing on dress to the medical school's first 60 students, he observed that in Dunedin all male students wore collar and tie during term time, but the weather in Auckland allowed a dispensation from this code in the first term.

But he declined to guess what dress code the female students would decide upon, adding: "I can do little more than fear the worst and hope for the best."

In 1973, aged 57, Lewis somewhat abruptly resigned - "a deliberate act of release" - saying he had achieved most of what he had set out to do. A milestone had been reached with the completion of the initial stage of the medical school building and the passing out of the first group of students.

Before he left New Zealand he suggested health boards here should be less hospital-oriented and cater better for communities.

Professor Lewis died at Abergavenny in Wales, near his birthplace. He is survived by his wife Helen and three of four children.