Darcy Cowan strong campaigner from Adelaide Hospital for TB care and cure, including BCG vaccine
Dr Darcy Cowan and the Adelaide Hospital with the Frome Ward for tuberculosis patients, opened in 1932, in the left foreground and the chest clinic in the (opened in 1938) in the left middle ground.
Images courtesy Health Museum of South Australia
As honorary physician to the Adelaide Hospital in 1924-25, Darcy Cowan became increasingly absorbed with tuberculosis and its toll on young people, nurses and doctors exposed to it. He took on a mission of prevention, patient care, and convincing colleagues and government that tuberculosis should be successfully tackled.
Born in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood in 1885, Cowan attended Prince Alfred College and Adelaide University (MB, BS, 1908) where he won a triple blue in lacrosse, football (later with Norwood league team) and tennis, and also played cricket.
Cowan and his wife were in England at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he was appointed temporary lieutenant in the Royal Army medical corps. Returning to South Australia, in 1916 he joined the Australian Army medical corps reserve as an honorary captain. After the war, as honorary physician to Adelaide Hospital, his concern about tuberculosis took him in 1937 to visit the United States of America to investigate methods of control.
As president (1935-36) of the South Australian branch of the British Medical Association, he became a foundation fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1938.
His constant forthright pressure resulted in a chest clinic and the Frome Ward for tuberculous patients with Cowan was physician-in-charge (1938-50).
In 1943, he criticised one tuberculosis ward in Adelaide for being next to a dusty coal dump and with a full view of the hospital mortuary. That year he founded the South Australian Tuberculosis Association, devoted to the welfare of patients, to public education and to the study of the disease.
In 1947 in London, he emphasised providing economic and psychological relief for sufferers and for their families. Returning to Adelaide, he introduced the bacillus calmette-guérin (BCG) vaccine prepared by Dr Nancy Atkinson at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science. Next year he helped to form the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in Australia and forged links with kindred societies in Britain and America.
Frome Ward and also Kalyra, Bedford, and Morris hospitals in the 1940s and 1950s used lung collapse therapy with air being placed either in the pleural or peritoneal cavities. This was the favoured treatment in the pre-antibiotic era for collapsing and resting the diseased lung. It was fraught with complications and, fortunately, Royal Adelaide Hospital had kept up with rapid progress in modern thoracic surgery. Many patients had the effects of pneumothorax therapy fixed by surgery.
