Professor John Pearn AM
Professor John Pearn has given a lifetime of service to medicine and defence. He has served as Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at The University of Queensland and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital since 1968. He graduated from Medicine with first class honours in 1964 and was commissioned in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps in 1965. After serving in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, the Arctic, Rwanda and Banda Aceh he was promoted to the rank of Major General and served as the Surgeon-General of the Australia Defence Force.
John spent time serving in the Arctic in 1978 when he was on survival research in conjunction with the Norwegian and British armies, and in 1994 flew to Rwanda during the genocide emergency. In 2004, John served as the Intensivist Senior Physician as part of the Australian Emergency Response Team to the Asian tsunami.
He has also worked in conjunction with the World Health Organisation and UNESCO on health issues and has done research into accidental deaths like poisoning and drowning.
He is a founder, former national president and honorary life member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine. He is a Member of the Committee of Management of the International Society of the History of Medicine, a Gold Medallist of the American Biographical Institute and an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green College, Oxford, United Kingdom. He was named Queensland Senior Australian of the Year in 2005 and The University of Queensland's 13th Alumnus of the Year in 2004.
He is the author of many books on clinical medicine, the history of military medicine, the history of healthcare and a biography.