Medical Alumni Association e-Newsletter: September 2008

Dear Colleagues

This is the first e-Newsletter from your Medical Alumni Association. We hope it will eventually reach all alumni who have access to emails. At present, we have email addresses for fewer than 40% of graduates from the Faculty of Medicine. If you like the idea of receiving regular e-Newsletters about people and events in Sydney and beyond, and think that your friends and colleagues will be interested too, please forward this email to them.

Why have another communication when you already receive Radius and the Sydney Alumni Magazine? The general aims are to:

• inform you about forthcoming events
• complement the stories about people and the events in Radius and the Sydney Alumni Magazine (SAM)
• encourage you to contribute material to the Faculty's alumni website
• develop networks of medical alumni who would like to work with others and tell the stories of what our colleagues have achieved in their professional and personal lives (see my column in the September 2008 Radius)

With University and Faculty funding of full-time positions, we can increasingly assist in organising reunions (as Diana Lovegrove is doing constantly) and in providing informative stories for the Faculty's online history. As noted elsewhere, Lise Mellor, with assistance from alumni, photographers and the Faculty's IT staff, has compiled a stunning array of historical photographs, digitised year books, teaching material, stories and memorabilia on the history of the Faculty and our teaching hospitals. This online history will be launched soon.

In the attached Newsletter, Sydney's medical mosaic: telling our stories, I have included brief sections on:

• forthcoming events
• passions, hobbies and lives beyond medical practice
• references to some publications of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, reminiscences, and reunions - these are examples and no doubt we will gradually accumulate many more for the alumni records. We are keen to be informed about obituaries or biographies of alumni published in specialist journals or elsewhere
• tributes, obituaries and death notices published in newspapers. I quite frequently have comments from some alumni who are disappointed not to know about the deaths of their colleagues. I regularly look at death notices in the Sydney Morning Herald. These usually assist us to identify medical colleagues by including 'Dr' in the death notice. The person's name is then checked against alumni records
• did you know these colleagues? RSVP. We have received requests from two families who are seeking more information about two of our medical alumni at the time they were students and soon after graduation
• books on the history of the Faculty of Medicine
• hospital histories
• regional medical histories
• other recent books published by our alumni - it is not intended to include medical textbooks in this section!

The year in brackets after colleagues' names indicates their year of graduation.

The success of the e-Newsletter will depend on you sending material that will interest colleagues. If it seems more appropriate for your material to be included in Radius rather than in the e-Newsletter, I will forward it to the editors (Beth Quinlivan and Amanda Durack). I hope to send you e-Newsletters every month or two.

Please open the attached document on Sydney's medical mosaic: telling our stories, then send your comments to me at

Paul Lancaster
President, Medical Alumni Association
University of Sydney

30 September 2008