Blackburn, Charles Ruthven Bickerton (CRB)

Son of Sir Charles Bickerton Blackburn, Chancellor of the University and a former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. His academic career began in the Faculty of Arts and then he switched to medicine, graduating with first class honours in 1937, first place in the Final Year Exam, the Harry J Clayton Memorial Prize for Medicine and Clinical Medicine, the Hinder Memorial Prize for Clinical Surgery and the Windeyer Prize for Obstetrics and Clinical Obstetrics. He was a resident at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) and obtained his MD in 1939 for research on myeloma.

In 1940 he joined the AIF and served in the Middle East and New Guinea, and, as Lieutenant Colonel and Commanding Officer of the Medical Research Unit in Cairns. While in Cairns, he worked in close association with Sir Neil Hamilton Fairley studying chemotherapeutic suppression and prophylaxis of malaria. Following discharge from the army, he was appointed as Assistant Physician at the RPAH.

Following a year as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Columbia University, New York, he was appointed Director of the Clinical Research Unit at RPAH. He later became Senior Physician, Member of the Board of Directors, Chairman of the Division of Medicine and Chairman of the project Planning Team and exerted a profound influence on the Hospital, initiating many important changes.

He was appointed Bosch Chair of Medicine and Professor and Head of the Department of Medicine in 1957. Blackburn had an immediate impact on the students and on the teaching of medicine not only in the Medical School of the University of Sydney, but throughout Australia. He had inherited a Department in which there was almost no active research, no academic staff and very little in the way of physical facilities. He immediately set out to build an academic department of Medicine with three principal aims:

1. to develop academic departments in each of the teaching hospitals 2. to develop a strong research-orientated academic group on campus and to attract first-class people into academic medicine; and, 3. to establish close harmonious relationships with the teaching hospitals and to eliminate or blur the difference between academic and non academic physicians.

At the time of Blackburn's appointment as Professor of Medicine in 1957, he was the only full time member of its academic staff. At the time of his retirement in 1978 there were six full time Professors and ten other full time members of the academic staff, as well as professorial units in all the teaching hospitals. (From 'Centenary Book of the University of Sydney, Faculty of Medicine' ed by JA Young, AJ Sefton & N Webb (Sydney University Press, 1984)