My association with Graham Joplin goes back many years to our time at Island Bay Primary School which we left in 1939 for Wellington College. Graham's family home was opposite the Island Bay tennis club, and I have many happy memories of games on these courts with Graham, sister Pat, and other friends. Mr and Mrs Joplin were always most hospitable, and more than 40 years later whenever I called to catch up on news of Graham there was always a cup of tea with fresh, homemade scones.
After qualifying at medical school in Dunedin, Graham was house surgeon for two years at Wellington Hospital, and in 1954 he was appointed to the position of Pathology Registrar at Palmerston North Hospital. The following year he travelled to the UK as ship's surgeon on the Royal Star . The first port of call was Callao in Peru, to deliver a precious cargo of prize rams in good order.
Graham resided at London House, where overseas post-graduate students - many from the Dominions - were accommodated. He passed the examination for Membership of the Royal College of Physicians - MRCP - and held resident appointments at the Brompton Hospital for Chest Diseases, Central Middlesex and Hammersmith Hospitals. In 1958 he met Helen, his wife-to-be, while she was a senior nurse at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. We were living in London at the time, and I will never forget the occasion when Graham brought his fiancée to our house - and what a stunner she was! Graham and Helen were married in 1959. Graham had developed an interest in endocrinology, and he was appointed to the department at the famous Hammersmith Hospital - then headed by another New Zealander, Russell Fraser.
Graham remained there for the rest of his career, being in turn Registrar, Reader and subsequently Professor, with the personal chair in clinical endocrinology. He was involved in the development of a procedure to implant radioactive yttrium rods into the pituitary gland without the need for surgically opening the skull: this was used in the treatment of some cases of advanced cancer and diabetic eye disease, and was a procedure he lectured on and demonstrated during a three-month tour of the United States in 1962. Calcium metabolism and growth hormone were other matters of particular interest to him, and in all these areas he gained an international reputation. He was guest lecturer at conferences in South America, South Africa and in the Middle East - Iraq, Egypt and Syria. He was often accompanied by Helen who has assured me that it was mere coincidence that revolution and coups seemed to follow some of these places after his visit. He was associated with European colleagues in similar studies in Switzerland, Germany and Italy, and he was equally at home on the Continent as he was in London.
It was a cruel blow that the effects of Parkinson's Disease forced him to retire early, while he still had a great deal to give to this family, his colleagues and medical research.
(These memories were among those compiled in 1998 for a book of “Memories of Form 4A 1941, Wellington College)