Mike Morgan: Charismatic is going a bit far. (laughter) He was a dominating person!

John Rogers: The Arthur Amies of his time! There have been some areas of tension, but in the main the Department supports what the University is trying to do to train a future workforce that suits the needs of the Victorian community.

Ann Westmore: From the dental side, does anyone have a view about the development of that relationship.

Henry Atkinson: There was a similar relationship in the past, but it was more direct. Then, the control of the hospital service was by the Hospitals and Charities Commission. If you were to approach its Chairman, Dr John Lindell,[90] and work downwards, as people like Sir William Anderson and others did, you were sort of buttering the bread as it went.

Ann Westmore: Did you have meetings with Dr Lindell yourself?

Henry Atkinson: Yes, on occasion he would come down. But he was Chairman of the Ministerial Advisory Committee for four years, which looked into the activities of the Hospital.[91]

Controversy over the Dental School quota

Ann Westmore: What, in particular, stimulated that investigation?

Henry Atkinson: It was because we reduced the quota [of dental students] from 73 to 45. The Government had spent £2 million on building a new Hospital and there hadn’t been one more patient treated or one more student qualify. So the Government was bound to ask questions.

Ann Westmore: And when you told the Government that this had been done because there were not sufficient staff members, what was the response?

Henry Atkinson: They knew well before. I’d been telling them for two years what we were going to do.

One of the complications was that on the Faculty, which was the body that selected the students, there was an overabundance of private practitioners. I’ll probably get shot for this. (laughter)

Then, when in 1963, as John said, the College [of Dentistry] went out of business, they lost their representatives on the Faculty. So the University could make its voice heard, and we managed to reduce the quota.

This goes back to the number of technicians to the number of dentists. The [Australian Dental] Association basically wanted to increase the number of dentists at any cost. We wanted to maintain an academic standard because in that particular year, 1963, we were forced to take on 16 students who had failed their previous courses at the University and had not been allowed to repeat. Yet the Faculty accepted it, although I was totally opposed.

At a meeting of the Faculty, there was one student who had failed I think Arts twice, he didn’t have the necessary requirements – I think he didn’t have Physics, and yet two leading members of the profession including Sir Arthur Amies voted him into the quota. He was the 73rd member [of the class]. So that was the situation we were up against!

From that year on, the quota was slowly decreased, and the quality of the students, in an academic sense, went up. I think that’s shown in their marks [for entry into dentistry] today where they equate with medicine and law.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine