Australian National University Medical School - History of The Medical School

History of The Medical School

Walter Burley Griffin’s plan for the design of Canberra not only designated Acton peninsula as a hospital site, but did so whilst simultaneously placing it adjacent to a university where he envisaged a medical school would be located. One of the best extant sources of evidence of the geometry and intent of Walter Burley Griffin’s formally adopted plan for Canberra, is set out in the Report of Federal Capital City Designs of the Board of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (1912). The following excerpts are taken from pages 18 and 19 of that report.

“Black Mountain rising almost directly out of the waters at the Western end of the “Water Axis,” is set off from the formal pool by the University and surrounding Professional schools…it will be noted that fundamental sciences, descriptive of nature lead directly to the theoretical sciences dependent on them…Some such arrangement is necessary to permit proper expansion in these changing fields, with convenience to students. Moreover it is endeavoured to direct these lines on the site to such fields for actual application as are more available to them…Thus from Physiology and Gymnasia open onto the broad flat athletic grounds and the water areas and the Hospital, of itself in a most suitable isolated location with equable temperature and atmospheric conditions is adjoined by the Medical, Surgical, Pharmaceutic schools."

The Canberra Community Hospital on Acton peninsula (which was later named the Royal Canberra Hospital ) had possessed a Department of Clinical Science since 1965, its foundation professor being Malcolm Whyte and its laboratories being linked to the Australian National University's (ANU) John Curtin School of Medical Research. Amongst others, Dr Marcus de Laune Faunce advocated that the Royal Canberra Hospital be linked with a medical school at the ANU.

In the early 1970s the ANU narrowly missed out on a medical school, which went to the University of Newcastle. HM Whyte in a study of the early moves for a university medical school in Canberra details how the proposal was initiated by a question addressed to the ANU by the Director-General of Health in 1963, considered by hospital and university committees, approved by a report in 1965, bolstered by an international conference in 1968, encouraged by the Universities Commission and fleshed out into a formal submission to the Universities Commission in 1971. A government-funded fealibility study commenced in 1974 and reported in 1976. In July 1976, however, the ANU University Council decided: "in view of recent statements on funding for universities...there was no advantage to be had in developing further at present the study so far undertaken". The 1980s had seen an involvement in the teaching of a small cohort of final-year students from the University of Queensland in Canberra, and in 1993 the University of Sydney began to develop its Canberra Clinical School.

In April 2001, after intense public debate and a committee of inquiry lasting eight months, it was announced that the Australian National University (ANU) was to develop Australia's 12th and the world's 896th medical school. Shortly afterwards staff at the medical school made a proposal to the National Capital Authority that the old hospice and isolation block facilities on Acton Peninsula (which had been heritage listed for a health use) should be leased to the Medical School for teaching and clinical purposes.