KEY POINTS:
Professor Alan Clarke, CMG, medical leader. Died aged 74.
Many people have described Alan Clarke as man of drive and ability. He established successful careers as a leading surgeon and as a medical administrator. He was a man inclined, say friends, to be 100 per cent committed to any activity he undertook.
Dr Jim Clayton, who has known him since 1952 when the pair began medical training at Otago, also mentions spontaneity, a sense of humour "and the characteristic belly laugh that was his hallmark".
But Clarke, born in New Plymouth in 1932 and schooled at King's College in Auckland, was also a man who, with his wife and four children, had to find the courage to deal with two awful events in his life.
The first "injury", as he called it, came after an extensive career and prominence as a surgeon at Otago University including many major medical papers and contributions to surgical textbooks.
Among many medical interests was cancer. But in 1979 he was found to need radical surgery and radiotherapy for cancer of the bladder. Worse, he was given only a 20 per cent chance of surviving for two years.
He lived, although in 2002 he told Laura Hershey in an interview for an international "webzine" Disability World that he found he was unable to perform major surgery with the same "stamina" as previously.
So in 1985 he resigned the Otago University chair of surgery and his university professorship which he had held since 1970 and became dean of the School of Medicine at Christchurch.
His forthright eight years in the position were characterised in a valedictory note on his leaving as "a breath of fresh air in a traditional school, the zephyr occasionally assuming the strength of a Canterbury nor'wester".
He pressed for the abolition of lectures and the school's clinical science course and restructured the undergraduate course to emphasise learning by discovery - learning in the "research mode".
Restructuring of the health sector in these years sometimes meant conflict with colleagues but he refused to shirk informed debate on controversial issues.
And during his time at the school came his second injury. On Sunday afternoon, April 14, 1991, this former keen sportsman, aviator and ornithologist fell off the roof of his house and became a paraplegic.
By his own figures only 25 per cent of people with spinal cord injuries get back to work "which is a measure of how unsuccessful our rehab is".
But Alan Clarke preferred recounting words an old lady said to him soon after he resumed work:
"You are very lucky at your age becoming a paraplegic. You can start life all over again. Not many of us get a chance to do that."
Two years after his fall he was asked to become clinical director of the spinal unit at Burwood Hospital in Christchurch.
"After a few milliseconds of deliberation I accepted and started a whole new career."
In that job he insisted to patients that they owned their own clinical problem or disability.
"Stop dwelling on your misfortune, disability and what you cannot do. And start learning what you can do and do it."
Alan Clarke was made a Companion of the Most Excellent Order of St Michael and St George in 1995 for services to medicine "including his significant contribution to medical research".
A summary of his positions, awards, visiting professorships, consultant tasks, publications and the like runs to two closely typed pages.
He is survived by his wife, Jane, and family.
