Ann Westmore: You clearly knew Howard well as a very able clinician and researcher. Do you think perhaps that his political skills may not have been quite what was required?

Max Kent: He had many talents, but they were different from Vernon's. What I would say is that he wasn’t unskillful politically.

Unidentified female voice: I felt that Vernon Collins had a whole range of talents and strengths. He broke with the traditional dichotomy between physical and mental health and saw paediatics as extending care to the whole child - physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially disadvantaged child. To him, paediatrics was an occupation that required an awareness of the child's optimal functioning.

Ann Westmore: Does anyone else have any comments about the holistic approach that Vernon Collins was noted for?

Bernard Neal: He was very involved in freeing up the opportunities for parents to visit their children in hospital. I worked in England in 1954 and I was interested to note that the arrangements for parents visiting their children in hospital were actually superior back in Melbourne.

Arthur Clark: As it was for a further twenty years.

Bernard Neal: Previously parents could visit once a week on Sunday afternoons and that was it because the children often cried after they went home. It sounds barbaric, but that was the arrangement at the time.

Also, in the Vernon Collins' era, we used to have, at about lunchtime every day, in the old hospital a little parent information discussion/consultation. That was when the parents were all told they could see the Resident and find out how their child was getting on and what was happening to them. Until then, parents had no right of access to medical staff, or to their own children!

Max Robinson[66]: Another aspect of care of babies who had just been delivered and were in the nursery. Vernon Collins promulgated the view of "living in", mothers having their babies beside them. This had a number of benefits, apart from bonding which is the obvious thing. Secondly, infection. It limited the spread of infection to babies by minimising the time they spent in the nursery.

Bernard Neal: There was opposition from some of the nursing staff to these changes. They thought this was terrible.

Ann Westmore: And how were these innovations regarded by doctors in other hospitals?

Arthur Clark: I think I must mention here a paper published in the mid-1950s about the adoption of more liberal visiting hours by Kate Campbell and Marion Ievers, who was a children's ward sister at the Queen Vic.[67] They had adopted these changes while the Children’s was still letting parents in on Sunday afternoon. I don’t want to put down what’s been said about Vernon, but he picked that up and said this is what we have to do.

Ann Westmore: Thanks for that point of clarification, Arthur.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine