Professor Lloyd Cox shakes up Adelaide medicine's education and role in women's reproductive health
Adelaide University medical school gained its first home on Frome Road, Adelaide, next to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, in 1947. Professor Lloyd Cox made the radical decision to move the school's obstetrics and gynaecology department to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Lloyd Cox’s appointment as Adelaide University’s professor of obstetrics and gynaecology in 1958 brought the biggest 20th Century shakeup in South Australian medicine.
Cox was one of three professors, with High Robson (medicine, 1953) and R.P. Jepson (surgery, 1958), to replace the directors of studies heading departments, as arranged by (Royal) Adelaide Hospital senior surgeon and teacher Ivan Jose, the dean of medicine from 1948.
Adelaide medical school finally got its own building in 1947 on Frome Road, Adelaide, near hospital wards. This met the university expansion with the free enrolment for World War II returned servicemen and women, with medical students rising from 144 in 1935 to 546 in 1949.
The medical curriculum was set by the university (confirmed in 1921) but the hospital’s honorary medical staff had strong influence on students’ thoughts and attitudes until 1971.This was when the 90-year honorary staff teaching tradition was replaced by employing visiting specialists paid per session.
Professor’s Cox’s appointment in 1958 had been an earlier upset for Adelaide’s medical establishment – particularly in obstetrics and gynaecology at Royal Adelaide and Queen Victoria hospitals that had luminaries such as Brian Swift. Not only was Cox an outsider (from New Zealand) chosen over a favoured local candidate, he chose the maternity section of the unfinished Queen Elizabeth Hospital at Woodville as site of the new obstetrics and gynaecology department.
With a distinguished student and consultant background, Cox had been senior lecturer at Otago University and visiting specialist at Dunedin Hospital where he’d set up an infertility clinic. He came to Adelaide for a quieter life but over 25 years he led clinical, legal and organisation advances in Adelaide. Besides teaching most of the O&G medical course, he was involved in university administration and influenced state policy on reproductive technology, family planning and abortion.
Cox was chair (1981-82) of the committee looking at abortion notification in South Australia. He led the maternal mortality committee that recommended decriminalising abortion as happened with attorney general Robin Millhouse’s private member’s bill. Cox was on the subcommittee into perinatal deaths and chaired the committee advising the state government on its reproductive technology act. He was first chair of the South Australian council on reproductive technology that developed ethical, clinical and research practice, opening new ground in Australia.
Cox was appointed dean of Adelaide University faculty of medicine (1963-65) and chaired the influential education committee. Cox was national president of the family planning association of Australia and led the family planning association of South Australia (now Shine SA). As president (1975-78) of the Australian council of the Royal College of Gynaecologists, he guided forming an Australian college that, to his delight 20 years later, became the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
Besides innate surgical ability, Cox’s wide interest in gynaecology included being first president of the society of psychosomatic obstetrics and gynaecology. He authored Gynaecology, Sex and Psyche with Lorraine Dennerstein, Graham Burrows and Carl Wood.
Cox had a senior role in the national health and medical research council, on the universities commission on medical schools and promoted Adelaide’s need for a new medical school. He was appointed a member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for services to women's health.
