James Vincent Duhig - extraordinary penicillin pioneer ; extraordinary Australian

 Its not as if academic Australia has ignored JV (James Vincent) Duhig : his name has to turn up in any account of Australia’s school of rationalist thought, its tee-tolling irishmen,its painters & dramatists, its founder of famous literary journals & of medical schools, its polio and penicillin brave warriors extraordinaire.

(I might have missed a few.) (His pioneering blood bank work for one.)

But he is not popularly known throughout Australia - not like his famous uncle archbishop Sir James Duhig, who actually managed to outlive his nephew. Bishop Duhig, like his nephew was a builder of institutions (University of Queensland among them) but he was more famous for the sturdy physical institutions he threw up all over Greater Brisbane.

The Irish Catholic for most of Australia’s history were its largest minority by far - a very powerful minority as they tended to remain employees, work the trades and join unions and thence the Labor party.

Queensland was the most Irish Catholic part of the entire country and hence Bishop Duhig’s powers locally were even more significant. It might not be a coincidence than his long reign as Bishop spanned the equally long reign of when the Labor party dominated politics at the federal and State level.

This is all to say that while JV Duhig was a very brave and bold medical pioneer, particularly in such a cautious and conservative little country, his self-confidence might have coming simply from being a ‘Duhig’ in Brisbane-town, even if he was famously a free thinker and his other relatives stalwarts of the church universal !

Here are some photos of the man - until recently I could only find one terrible photo of him, these are much better : the first while a young med student, the next taken in the 1940s while preparing a bust of JV, and then JV as a bust, the next is his famous uncle and last was also taken in the 1940s.

I recently learned that he somehow made the time to help found one of Australia’s best known literary journals in the same year he was busy singlehandedly making penicillin en masse and saving lives.

 (Because while he felt that the wartime federal government was moving forward on the antibiotic with the best speed any government is capable of - which is to say ‘moderately fast’  —- for his dying civilian patients, that was simply not good enough...)