Don Beaven

Don Beaven: The Doctor Who Built a Medical School

In August 2009, at eighty-four, Sir Donald Beaven accepted a knighthood. Ten weeks later he was dead, having gone in to fight a fire at his bach at Little Akaloa on Banks Peninsula. Nearly a thousand people came to the memorial service. For half a century he had been the man who dragged diabetes care in New Zealand out of the shadows, and who turned a provincial hospital into a medical school by the simple expedient of refusing to accept that it could not be done.

Christ's College and Otago

Born on 31 August 1924 and raised in Christchurch, Beaven went to Christ's College and then south to read medicine at the University of Otago, qualifying MB ChB through Otago and Dunedin Hospital in 1949. His first substantial work as a doctor was at Karamea — an isolated settlement on the West Coast of the South Island, about as far from a teaching hospital as New Zealand medicine gets. A career that would end in professorships and honours began with a young man in a rural practice discovering how much of medicine is done alone.

London and Boston

Like most ambitious New Zealand physicians of his generation he went abroad to be finished. Registrar posts in London hospitals occupied 1951 to 1954. He returned home in 1955 as a medical tutor in Christchurch, then went out again as a Fulbright fellow to Harvard and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston in 1958–59 for postdoctoral research. Boston in those years was one of the places where clinical endocrinology was becoming a laboratory science rather than a branch of shrewd observation, and Beaven came back convinced that the two had to be done in the same building by people who ate lunch together.

Building Christchurch

From 1960 he was a senior lecturer for the University of Otago and, crucially, the first director of the teaching and research unit that Otago established in Christchurch — a unit created to train final-year medical students and conduct research in a city that had no medical school. He supervised the Medical Unit at Princess Margaret Hospital in Cashmere, and did the thing that mattered most: he recruited scientists to work alongside clinicians on the detection of abnormal hormone function. By 1967 the unit was, in a colleague's phrase, in full swing, with several physicians in training. Contemporaries described him as debonair and brilliant, and he clearly recruited on charm as much as on argument.

At the start of the 1970s the experiment was made permanent: Beaven became foundation professor of medicine at the Christchurch School of Medicine and chairman of hospital services for the North Canterbury Hospital Board. The lecture theatre at the school carries his name. What he had built was a research culture in a place that had every reason not to have one, and the endocrine discoveries that later came out of Christchurch — most famously in the natriuretic peptides — grew in soil he had prepared.

The Diabetes Campaign

Beaven published more than seventy papers, chiefly on endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes mellitus, and served as president of the New Zealand Endocrine Society, on the censors' board of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, on the government's Dieticians Board and in the executive of the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation. But the work that reached ordinary New Zealanders was the diabetes campaign. He was a founding member of Diabetes Christchurch, the country's first diabetes support organisation, and he spent decades on prevention rather than treatment alone — arguing, long before it was fashionable, for the Mediterranean pattern of eating and for a national conversation about how people actually live. His commemorative plaque calls him the founder of diabetes research and care in New Zealand and a tireless promoter of the healthy life. The second phrase is the one he earned the hard way, by saying the same thing for forty years.

Vines, Olives, Mountains and Music

The non-medical Beaven was equally busy and slightly improbable. He helped establish the South Island wine industry, planting vineyards and olive groves near Christchurch and on Banks Peninsula — a practical extension of the Mediterranean argument he had been making to his patients. He was an accomplished mountaineer, a serious chamber music enthusiast, an art collector, and a reader of New Zealand history. He married the violinist Teresa Josephine Fahey in 1956 and they had two daughters; the marriage ended, and he was survived by his second wife, Gillian. His academic career concluded at the University of Canterbury.

Why Don Is Called a Genius

Beaven's case does not rest on discovery, and any honest account has to begin there. No eponymous syndrome, no landmark paper, no result that changed a textbook; seventy-odd publications is a solid academic output, not a seismic one. What he had instead was a rare institutional imagination allied to persuasive force. He grasped, before the New Zealand medical establishment did, two things that were not obvious in 1960: that a research-grade medical school could be grown in Christchurch rather than imported, and that the coming epidemic of diabetes would be settled at the population level by diet and behaviour, not at the bedside by better drugs. He then spent fifty years acting on both propositions — recruiting laboratory scientists into a clinical unit, building a school, founding a patients' organisation, and campaigning in public until the message stuck.

The counter-case: the ideas were not original to him — clinician-scientist units and Mediterranean-diet epidemiology were established currents he read early and imported well — and much of his reputation is local, a country of four million elevating the man who built its southern medical infrastructure. Genius is a large word for what is essentially very high-grade professional leadership. But the test of a builder is what stands afterwards, and the school, the research culture, the diabetes organisation and the vineyards are all still there. That is not nothing, and in a small country it is a great deal.

Legacy

Beaven was appointed CBE in the 1989 New Year Honours for services to medicine and the community, made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005 for services to persons with diabetes, and accepted re-designation as a Knight Companion in August 2009; he also held the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. In March 2009 he was named one of Christchurch's Twelve Local Heroes, and a bronze bust by Mark Whyte was placed at the Arts Centre. He died on 4 November 2009. The Emeritus Professor Sir Donald Ward Beaven Medal is awarded annually by the Health Research Council for diabetes research, and the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation runs a Don Beaven Travelling Fellowship — sending young New Zealand researchers overseas, exactly as he had gone, on the understanding that they will come back.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire — 1998
• Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit — 2004
• Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit‎ — 2009
• Held posts at University of Otago
• Fields: medicine, medical research and diabetes