Peter Mac Callum Cancer Centre - History

History

The Victorian Cancer Institute's cancer hospital was given the title "Peter MacCallum Clinic" after the (then) Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Melbourne University, Peter MacCallum, who along with Rutherford Kaye-Scott had a significant role in its founding. At the time (c. 1949) it was a common practice not to inform patients that they had cancer. It was thought that, because radiotherapy was also quite commonly used at that time to treat non-cancerous conditions such as severe acne, "strawberry birthmarks", frozen shoulders, keloid scars — and, also, to provide a valuable, non-invasive means for medical sterilization — the name "Peter MacCallum Clinic" would be much less threatening because the "Clinic" could be "positioned" as a specialist radiotherapeutic Centre, rather it being thought of as a dedicated cancer hospital.

Read more about this topic:  Peter Mac Callum Cancer Centre

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?
    Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
    There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
    Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)