Adolescent Health Profile - Murray Williams

Murray Williams

Paying tribute to Dr Murray Williams AO is, for me, a highly pleasurable and deeply personal matter. Professionally speaking, no-one I have known has had a more profound or enduringly positive impact on systems and individuals, in terms of advancing the health and healthcare of young people. And while many colleagues will be aware of certain pivotal pioneering endeavours proudly bearing his name, including the creation of national and International associations for adolescent health, the origins and generous nature of his contributions may be less well known. 

My own initial encounters with this thoughtful, understated man were as an apprehensive, 18-year old freshman attending the University of Queensland Student Health Service, which he had established in 1960. Dr Williams engaged in comfortable conversation – simply that – enabling me to settle down and feel heard and affirmed. Here was a clinician who clearly knew how (in his own words) ‘to listen quietly for the hidden, tangential ways in which adolescents express their concerns’.

Olivier Jeaneret, Murray Williams, David Bennett

Little that followed for me, across years of formal, hospital-based physician training and beyond, would equal in value those opportune moments of sensitively-modelled nurturing support. So it was to Dr Murray Williams that I subsequently returned in the early-1970s, to discover more about the field that he, as the inaugural Australian disciple, had earlier discovered and fully embraced. 

‘Askability’ and humility, creativity and art, a love of medical school teaching (extending well into retirement years), and a natural, warm-hearted approach to healthcare, are some of the crucial themes in Murray’s story. Reflecting on seven years in boarding school from age 11, he recalls stern and professional teaching, but a lack of empathy, and ‘no attempt at more affable interaction’. Later, at the residential University college he attended during his medical studies, ‘there was still scant personal care or pastoral assistance when help was needed’. He began to wonder, prophetically, how to bridge that gap. 

Murray graduated from the University of Queensland in 1951 and, two years later, became the resident doctor at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. The serendipitous discovery of an article in ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ in 1954 (“Adolescents Get a Doctor of Their Own”) led to his becoming ‘one of the early trainees at the only place anywhere where specific training was available, the Adolescent Unit of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts’. 

The Unit’s founder, J. Roswell Gallagher, had also come to his own special awareness of adolescents through his role as a school doctor – little wonder these two special men developed a close and long-lasting friendship. Working with adolescents for three years ‘in pure culture’, as Murray described his life-changing experience in Boston, shaped his conviction that ‘adolescent medicine was an area of intense interest and significance’, and he ‘returned to Australia in 1958 determined to pursue it’. 

This he has successfully done, spearheading both Student Health – setting up the student health service at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra), as well as at UQ – and Adolescent Medicine, in this country. It is interesting to note that Gallagher was the first President of the (then called) Society for Adolescent Medicine (1968) while Murray, marching proudly in his footsteps, went on to establish and lead both AAAH (1978) and IAAH (1987). One can but wonder at the infinite legacies of these stunning developments.

Bill Daniel, Suzanne Robertson, David Bennett, Murray Williams, and colleagues

At a more personal level, many people have enjoyed engaging with Murray, including appreciative patients and students who have kept in touch over long periods of time. Some owe their success or perhaps even their survival to his unstinting largesse, while others have benefited from attentive mentoring during their undergraduate courses and will remain ever in his debt. 

In 2017, in the company of family and friends at his home In Canberra, Murray celebrated his 90th birthday. Organisational and individual messages of congratulations and gratitude poured in from around the globe: Susan Sawyer joined the dots with IAAH’s 30th anniversary; Melissa Kang reported that “AAAH is alive and well…with new generations of vibrant health professionals providing the best possible care for young people”; and SAHM conveyed its respect and regard through its Newsletter, shared with over 1000 members worldwide. 

My own videoed birthday message enabled a brief reflection on decades of collegial collaboration and friendship. To this day, I realise, my conversations with Murray Williams have remained inspiring, encouraging and strangely calming. He is the quintessentially askable person, someone who ‘more by behaviour and attitudes than by information, conveys an open-ness, acceptance and caring that makes it easy to come and talk’. This is after all – as he sagely reminds us as often as he can – ‘the hallmark of good adolescent care’.