By CASEY NEILL
Precede:
Narre Warren North doctor Norval Yeaman and his wife Alma have dedicated their lives to helping others. They spoke to CASEY NEILL about their 60-plus years in medicine.
Pull quote:
“It’s just astonishing, the sort of progress in the last 50 years.”
DOCTOR Norval Yeaman is almost 90 years old and hung up his stethoscope more than 18 months ago, but former patients still stop him in the street and beg him to return to work.
Failing eyesight was behind his retirement – his second attempt at walking away from the job.
“We’re trying to back off now because the patients, they’ve got to reattach themselves somewhere else,” he said.
Norval stepped away from a group practice on Robinson Street, Dandenong, in 1993 and took a trip around Australia with wife Alma, a nurse.
But they soon set up a makeshift clinic in their Narre Warren North home.
“People started turning up here wanting to see me so we ended up carrying on,” Norval said.
“Though I had retired we were sort of forced into continuing.
“But we enjoy medical practice.”
Alma, who turns 87 this year, received an outpouring of sadness from patients when they closed the clinic doors.
“People will stop me in the street and say ‘Is your husband going to go back practicing?’ and I have to tell them ‘No, he’s not’,” she said.
Norval was a doctor for 62 years, after his principal at Shepparton High School nominated him and two other students to study medicine.
He spent his first year of general practice in Barhum, on the Murray River near Kerang.
“You used to have to do everything yourself,” he said.
“If a patient needed blood, you had to look up the directory and find out who’s the right group.”
“You had to call up, take the blood from them and then transfuse them.
“You had to do all this yourself.
“The blokes at Kerang and Kahuna used to share. When you needed someone else as well they used to come over and do the anaesthetic and you’d do the surgery.
“There were a lot more issues that you had to be very careful about because you were the beginning and the end.
“It was all experience and if you’re working on your own you get used to handling most situations.”
Norval’s seen great change in the medical profession during his decades on duty.
“When we started medicine there wasn’t much in the way of antibiotics except sulfonamides and penicillin,” he said.
“Now there must be thousands of antibiotics.
“It’s just astonishing, the sort of progress in the last 50 years.”
Norval and Alma married and moved to Dandenong in 1953 after meeting at the Royal Women’s Hospital.
“We joined a group practice, which was Robinson Street,” he said.
Alma said her husband worked 8am to 4pm most days “for many, many years” and that he would often pull into the driveway at home only to receive an emergency callout and turn back around.
Obstetric demands sometimes saw him deliver four babies in a night.
By way of defending the lengthy hours, Norval said hospitals didn’t have casualty departments in those days.
“The GPs had to do casualty at the hospital as well as their practice,” he said.
But there’s been reward for his efforts.
Alma said Norval treated a mother and her four sons about 40 years ago.
“She had to leave her husband because he was becoming violent on whiskey. She moved up to Queensland,” she said.
“Every year, without fail, she sends a Christmas card. It’s always to Alma and Doctor. It’s lovely that people remember.”
Alma has also put in plenty of hard work, clocking up 20 years as a nurse at Doveton Technical School and receiving the 1999 City of Casey Citizen of the Year award.
“I was just floored, wasn’t I?” she said.
“I just couldn’t believe it. I’d said to Norval beforehand ‘you won’t have to worry about me getting it, we can slip out’.
“I gathered they interviewed several of the teachers who gave me quite a wrap.”
Alma regularly paid for underprivileged students to attend excursions.
“The principal used to say to me ‘I don’t know what you come to work for, you give all your salary away’,” she said.
“What I did was what anyone would have done.”
Alma still runs into former students.
“Quite often you’re walking in Endeavour Hills and someone will say ‘Hello Sister!’,” she said.
“It’s very nice to know that they remember you and are happy to see you.”
The Yeamans have also raised three children.
Daughter Judy, from Endeavour Hills, runs volunteer service the Andrews Centre in Endeavour Hills and received an Order of Australia Medal for her efforts.
“I don’t know how she does it,” Alma said.
“She gives her life to the poor.
“They had a family come in, with a couple with five children sleeping in a car and she and her husband brought a property in James Cook Drive and put these people in it at a rent they could afford.
“They’re very dedicated.”
Son Leslie is a urologist in Canberra.
“I tried my best to talk Leslie out of doing medicine,” Alma said.
“I said to him ‘haven’t you seen enough of your father?’. He was very young at the time and I was very worried about whether he was making the right choice or not.
“However, he was determined like his father.”
Norval said Leslie always had a yen for knowledge.
“And I think he thought of medicine as a bottomless pit as far as knowledge is concerned,” he said.
“He’s got a number of senior qualifications.”
Daughter Sue, from Harkaway, is a midwife at Casey Hospital.
“I’m very pleased that they’ve grown up into very nice adult people,” Alma said.
“I think if you can achieve that as a mother you’ve done alright.”
With their children fending for themselves, the Yeamans feed up to 90 people at St James’ Anglican Church in Dandenong each Monday night.
“I ran it actually, for many years,” Alma said.
“But when Norval took ill I gave it up because I didn’t want to leave him for hours on end.
“St James would not be anything like as good at it is now without Norval.”
He interjected: “I wouldn’t quote that, that’s quite inappropriate”.
But Alma insisted “That’s quite true!”.
“For 41 years he was vicar’s warden and in those years it was his job with the other wardens to make sure that the church was kept in good condition, and he ran this church program so that they could effect repairs and so forth,” she said.
“He was very much involved for many years.”
The Yeamans shrug off praise.
“I had a lady yesterday telling me how wonderful she thought we were,” Alma said.
“I don’t think so at all, but people get funny ideas sometimes.”
But she conceded they had done a lot for the community over the years.
“We’ve tried to. I went into nursing to try and help people and Norval certainly gave his life to medicine and to his patients,” she said.
