John Adams was a physician and visiting physician in various hospitals in Wellington, New Zealand.
John Lewis Adams was born at Pahiatua on 17 October 1917, the son of Robert Tasman Adams, a barrister and solicitor, and Hilda Mary (née Cooper), whose father was a farmer. John attended Wellington College before studying medicine at Victoria then Otago Universities. His sporting talents earned him blues in athletics at both New Zealand and Otago, and he played rugby for Otago and held the New Zealand University record for discus throwing.
He trained at Wellington Hospital as a house physician and surgeon from December 1940 until March 1942, before serving in the Western Pacific and in Italy during World War II, reaching the rank of Major in the New Zealand Medical Corps. He worked in various field ambulance units and hospitals including the British General Hospital in Naples, and on the Dutch hospital ship NHMS Oranje. In 1942 he married Gwendolyne Lucy (née Harkness) and they had two sons and a daughter.
After the War he continued as a junior registrar, Wellington Hospital from 1946 before completing postgraduate studies in London (1947–1948) - attending the National Heart Hospital, the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases Queen Square, the London Hospital, and the Central Middlesex Hospital.1
Upon his return to New Zealand he became an assistant physician at Wellington Hospital from 1949 until 1954, when he moved to take up a role as a senior physician at Silverstream Hospital for long-term patients in the nearby city of Lower Hutt. He returned to Wellington as senior visiting physician in 1960 then assistant visiting physician until 1966. He was then promoted to senior visiting physician until his retirement in 1991.
During his career he wrote several papers in the New Zealand Medical Journal on a wide variety of topics including leukaemia and erythraemia, and The Autobiography of a Physician: the family, life and times of a New Zealand consultant physician, published by Steele Roberts, 2000.
John listed his hobbies as trout fishing, swimming, surf casting and photography.
John died at Lower Hutt on 18 April 2009.
RCP editor
Sources/further reading
1https://www.proquest.com/openview/2a0e0ca439a3b4a96de8eea5cc1086d1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1056335 (Obituary in the New Zealand Medical Journal, accessed 230623)