Joseph Cooke Verco has key contribution to establishing Adelaide University's medical school, opened in 1885
Joseph Cooke Verco worked on the first curriculum for Adelaide University school of medicine where he lectured from 1887, became dean of both the medical and dentistry faculties, and later served on the university council.
Joseph Cooke Verco brought the brilliance shown during his training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and the University of London in the 1870s to South Australia with key roles to strengthening skills through the new University of Adelaide medical school.
Back in Adelaide from England in 1878, Verco registered as a general practitioner in 1878, but gradually specialized as a physician and proved a skilled diagnostician. He was one of the earliest doctors in Adelaide to use a case-records system. when this became onerous, he learned shorthand. He became honorary physician (1882-1912) and then honorary consulting physician at the Adelaide Hospital and honorary medical officer at the Adelaide Children's Hospital. In 1888, he attempted to remove a hydatid of the brain in one of the first of such operations in Australia.
The first step to a school of medicine at the new University of Adelaide (opened 1874) was the 1881 proposal university council meeting by Edward Charles Stirling, also returning from distinguished training in England, that “a lectureship in human physiology be created”. In 1883, the university didn’t have funds for a full medical course to comply with the General Medical Council of Great Britain and Ireland. It considered a course where students, after second year, would transfer to Great Britain or medical schools in Melbourne or Sydney.
The financial barrier for this was partly removed when pastoralist/businessman Thomas Elder gave the university £10,000 for a chair in the medical faculty, and John Howard Angas, son of George Fife Angas, promised £6,000 for a chair in chemistry. The university council enlisted doctors Verco, William Gardner and William Gosse, to draw up the two-year curriculum.
The medical school started lectures in 1885 with six students (including Cromwell Magarey, son of Elziabeth Verco and Thomas Magarey) and a faculty of medicine was set up that year with the change to a complete five-year course including clinical teaching at Adelaide Hospital.
Joseph Cooke Verco was lecturer in medicine from 1887 to 1915, president of the Adelaide Medical Students in 1904 and 1906-15, dean of the faculty of medicine 1919-21 and also dean of the faculty of dentistry that he was significant in establishing. Verco was a member of the university council from 1895 to 1902 and 1919 to 1933.
For some years before retiring from medical practice in 1919, he specialised in consultative work as a physician. His limited writing on medical subjects include an article, with Stirling on in Allbutt’s System of Medicine:" “This not only collated the early literature, but was illuminated by the authors' personal experience of cases and at the time was recognised as a classic presentation of the subject”. Verco also compiled a review in 1879 of South Australian statistics on consumption.
