Australian Dictionary of Biography

Prof R. R. H. Lovell, by Norman Wodetzki

University of Melbourne Archives, UMA-ITE-2003000306579

Richard Robert Haynes (Dick) Lovell (1918–2000), professor of medicine, was born on 9 November 1918 at North Marylebone, London, younger child and only son of Arthur Gordon Haynes Lovell, captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and his wife Dorothy Constance, née Marriott, the daughter of a Church of England clergyman. Dick never knew his father who died of septicaemia in 1919. In his early years he felt a sense of obligation ‘to look after my mother and to fulfil all the promise that my father’s life was believed to have held’ (Jones 2000, 12). He boarded (1932–35) at Cheltenham College then studied medicine at St Mary’s Hospital medical school, University of London (MB BS, 1946; MD, 1949), where the dean was (Sir) Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran and physician to prime minister (Sir) Winston Churchill.

Having qualified LRCP and MRCS in 1941, Lovell was briefly a house physician at St Mary’s before serving in World War II, from August, as a temporary surgeon lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. In 1943 he joined the cruiser HMS Royalist, a unit successively of the Home (1944), Mediterranean (1944–45), and East Indies (1945) fleets. For distinguished service in the Far East, he was mentioned in dispatches. Returning to London in 1946, he was appointed house physician (1947), then medical registrar (1948–50) at the Brompton Hospital lung and heart centre. On 8 February 1947 at the parish church of St Paul, Sarisbury, Hampshire, he married Diana Margaret Warren, whom he had met early in the war when she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a cipher officer. Joining the professorial medical unit at St Mary’s Hospital as a senior lecturer in 1950, he formed a lifelong friendship with the unit head, (Sir) George Pickering, under whose mentorship he gained an appreciation of epidemiology and the determinants of hypertension.

In 1955 Lovell was appointed the inaugural (James Stewart) professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne (MSc, 1956), moving to Australia with his wife, two sons, and a daughter. Two more daughters were born in Melbourne. Lovell established university departments at the Royal Melbourne and Alfred hospitals, and his academic medical unit fostered a culture of evidence-based clinical practice. During the following decades, he and his colleague Maurice Ewing, the inaugural professor of surgery, collaborated productively with Priscilla Kincaid-Smith and others in establishing kidney transplantation at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Lovell won the confidence of senior medical staff with his knowledge and organisational skills, exemplified by his central role in a study of the efficacy of antihypertensive agents in the treatment of mild hypertension, an internationally significant health care question. Ingeniously, he combined the results of several studies to assess the effectiveness of various therapies in preventing death after a heart attack, laying the foundations for the statistical technique of meta-analysis. His unit attracted top postgraduate students from throughout Australia as well as from Europe, America, South-East Asia, and the Pacific, the latter being a site where he also did much to develop medical education and research. His personal contribution to medical knowledge was impressive: he wrote more than a hundred papers for medical journals, many as sole author. He was elected a fellow of the colleges of physicians in Australasia (1957), Britain (1960), and the United States of America (honorary 1975).

On his retirement in 1983, Lovell worked part time as the Melbourne medical school’s convenor of continuing education. He enjoyed more time to participate in the Boobooks dining club as an admired conversationalist, and in his hobbies of fly-fishing, landscape painting, and working in tapestry. A correspondence with Lord Moran’s widow led to him working through piles of Moran’s unsorted letters and papers on visits to England. The result was his book Churchill’s Doctor: A Biography of Lord Moran, published by Melbourne University Press in 1993.

Lovell also joined the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria (ACCV) as part-time executive secretary (1983–95) of its cooperative oncology group. With intellectual authority and a collaborative mindset, he nurtured a supportive network for oncologists to adopt the latest advances in cancer diagnosis, management, and treatment, contributing to higher patient survival rates. He later played an important role as senior adviser (1997–99) to the Federal government’s National Cancer Control Initiative. Reflecting his deep interest in medical ethics, he was appointed inaugural chair (1982–88) of the medical research ethics committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council. Under his leadership, the committee contributed to a continuing review of medical research in Australia and was responsible for recommending ethical principles for human research.

Among many accolades, Lovell was appointed AO in 1978 and received the University of Melbourne’s Sir William Upjohn medal in 1982. He cared for his ailing wife for many years until her death in 1998 from Parkinson’s disease. In his own final illness, he was lucid until the end, talking to medical students and refusing therapy which might have brought him temporary relief. Survived by his five children, John, Elizabeth, Peter, Caroline, and Judith, he died of bowel cancer on 30 April 2000 at Fitzroy, Melbourne, and was cremated. The University of Melbourne and the ACCV established a travelling scholarship for graduate students in his honour.