Abstract
It is a great honour to be asked to deliver this, the 15th Carl de Gruchy Memorial Lecture. Carl, whose outstanding career was cut short by his death in 1974 at the age of only 52, was a friend and mentor to many in Australia and New Zealand. He graduated with honours from the University of Melbourne Medical School in 1944. After residency training at St Vincent's Hospital he went to England in 1949 where he worked with Professor (later Sir John) Dacie, whose interest in the hemolytic anemias was to have a profound effect on Carl's own research work. He spent 6 months in the United States in 1951 on a Rockefeller Fellowship, and returned to Melbourne to set up a Clinical Research Unit at St Vincent's Hospital in 1952. He was appointed First Assistant in the University of Melbourne Department of Medicine at St Vincent's Hospital in 1958, and in 1962 he succeeded the late Professor John Hayden to the Chair of Medicine.