»Vale Professor Charles Bridges-Webb
Arts and Health has lost a great advocate with the passing today of Professor Charles Bridges Webb.
Charles and I formed a friendship some years ago through our shared interest in the links between arts and medicine and I have been privileged to sit on the board of the RACGP Foundation with Charles for five years. Charles was, in many ways, a mentor for me in the quest to promote arts in healthcare in Australia and in particular, to promote the importance of lifestyle balance, health and wellbeing for doctors through engagement with the arts. Charles and his wife Anne attended our inaugural arts and health conference in Port Macquarie in 2009.
His autobiography To Travel Hopefully is an account of a quiet, perceptive general practitioner and academic with a wide range of interests. It describes his life of travelling hopefully and organising his curiosity to try to find meaning in all that he experienced.
Charles was one of the founding fathers of general practice research in Australia. A graduate of the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Medicine in 1957, Charles commenced general practice research during his 15 years as a rural GP in Traralgon, East Gippsland. In 1971 Charles was awarded a Doctorate of Medicine by Monash University for this early research work, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in the same year.
He moved to Sydney in 1975 to take up the chair as Foundation Professor in Community Medicine/General Practice at the University of Sydney, where he was head of department until his formal retirement in 1994. In his role as Chairman of the WONCA International Classification Committee from 1991-1998, Charles was a key figure in the development of the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC). He was Director of the RACGP NSW&ACT Faculty's research unit until June 2010 and had an especial interest in dementia and we had been exploring the opportunity for research in the arts and dementia.
He was generous in the time he gave me and a courteous and spiritual man.
Margret Meagher 16 June 2010