The Patterson Years
The first Director of the Institute was Sydney W Patterson, a Melbourne medical graduate who had followed Mathison as a Beit Fellow with Starling at University College, where he had carried out outstanding research in physiology. Patterson took up his post at the end of 1919. It was a difficult time, fraught with post-war difficulties in supplies. Nevertheless, Patterson succeeded in equipping departments of bacteriology and serology, biochemistry, morbid anatomy and experimental pathology.
The Institute’s principal responsibility was research, but it was also expected to offer assistance to the medical work of the hospital in post-mortems and clinical pathology.
Some teaching was also offered to medical students and the institute housed a pathology museum. The research focus was on community diseases, particularly those affecting the respiratory tract, such as influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Other diseases studied included hydatid disease, dysentery, cancer, gonorrhea and malaria.
The Institute became a staging place for medical graduates returning from the war and many were to become notable figures in Australian medical history, including Neil Hamilton Fairley, Harold R Dew and Keith Fairley. Macfarlane Burnet also joined, straight out of medical school, to serve as acting pathological registrar. Patterson returned to England in 1923.
The first premises of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (1920-1938), at the Melbourne Hospital in Lonsdale Street.