Francis Joseph Hayden was an obstetrician and gynaecologist at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. His life was shaped by the Edwardian period of the twentieth century, his Catholicism, his medicine and his family. He was born 10 years before the Russian revolution and died 15 years after the Berlin Wall was demolished. As a young boy, he remembered running up to the Ballarat Post Office to read despatches from Gallipoli and the Western Front. The special treat for his childhood summer holidays was riding in a motor car. Shortly before he died, he watched with interest the election of the ninth pope of his lifetime. The youngest boy in a family of six children, his father died when he was four. He was educated at St Patrick’s College in Ballarat, before the family moved to Melbourne and he completed his studies at Xavier College in 1925. He obtained a place to study medicine at Melbourne University, following in the footsteps of his brother John (‘Jack’), who was no doubt a strong influence in his early medical career. Jack was later to become the first professor of medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. When Frank was studying his final undergraduate years, it was the late 1920s – the Great Depression. He was spared the worst of this time, because his studies at least gave him employment and food, unlike many he treated at the hospital. One of his characteristics was that he always acknowledged his good fortune. He lived through perhaps the greatest period of medical innovation and change. He commenced medicine before an organised blood bank service, before the clinical use of sulphonamides in the late thirties, antibiotics in the forties and 20 years before the greater understanding of virology. His medicine was one before plastic and the nationalised Australian medical system of Medicare. His medical residency commenced in 1932 at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. He remained there until the end of 1933, leaving to spend 1934 at the Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, where he passed his diploma in gynaecology and obstetrics. He then headed to England and obtained his membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1935, spending a great deal of his time working at the Jessop Hospital for Women in Sheffield. In 1937 Frank passed his FRCS and in the same year returned to Melbourne, coinciding with the opening of St Vincent’s Maternity Hospital. He obtained his FRACS in 1939. Leaving Europe in 1937 and escaping the build-up to the Second World War, he was fortunate that his skills as an obstetrician were of little use on the battlefront, grateful again to have spent the war in the safety of Australia. He failed to arrive at his own engagement party due to attending a sick patient, perhaps an early omen of their future life for his fiancée, Margaret Moore (‘Peg’), whom he married in February 1941. He could not have done what he did without Peg. She was his wife, his confidante and the mother and carer of their nine children. Her contribution to his medical care for others was immeasurable. She looked after him in her unselfish way and many other families owe much to their marriage and partnership. As a resident in the early 1930s, cross-matching for blood transfusions was done manually, sodium citrate was added for anticoagulation and blood was poured into a funnel connected to a cannula in a patient’s arm. He was later to see how the formulation of the blood bank greatly assisted in the treatment of postpartum hemorrhage. In his time in England he had seen the introduction of sulphonamides into clinical practice and was one of the first to use these in his practice for treating puerperal sepsis, another leap in obstetric care. On returning to Australia, his primary work, both public and private, was in the area of obstetrics in the newly-opened maternity wing. Frank was a key player in the development of this unit and his working life was strongly linked with St Vincent’s. I think he must have delivered in excess of 10,000 babies: not many people in this world get to see life commence that often. This was obstetrics before mobile phones or pagers, elective caesareans and inductions. His early surgical time in gynaecology, despite having more up to date training at the time, was restricted by the domination of some senior colleague to whom he was an assistant. As a number of the senior surgeons were recruited to work overseas in the Second World War, the younger well-trained surgeons took up their direct surgical work, only to be returned to their assistant position at the end of the war, as their senior colleagues returned. As was often the case, his clinical and surgical workload in gynaecology increased later in his career as his obstetric caseload was wound down. He was head of the gynaecology unit at St Vincent’s in the mid-sixties. He retired from all clinical practice in 1974. Whilst he no doubt enjoyed the privileges of the consultant’s position for a short while, he was not one to rant and rave when his car park space was built on or when the radiator of the Mercedes Benz boiled dry, for he knew that these things were not important. He was humbled a few years ago when returning to St Vincent’s, unrecognised by the young medical staff; he was greeted with warm affection by an old Italian cleaner. His Catholic principles and medical position made him a leader in the anti-abortion debate in Melbourne in the sixties and seventies, and he endured some harsh journalism. He was however genuinely and deeply saddened when one of these journalists was struck down with Alzheimer’s disease, many years later. He was not a man of malice. Frank was a man of the Enlightenment. His initial Christian Brothers and later Jesuit education taught him something about everything and his children and many grandchildren have all been enriched by his broad, yet selective, interests. The relationship with his God was a private one. Whilst he would love a High Mass sung in Latin, he was never seen to sing in a church himself. He loved the intimacy of chamber music, but was not a fan of opera. He was a great reader, but of biography and history, not fiction. His choice of visual art was painting not sculpture. He loved the theatre, but was not interested in ballet. He was a very good chess player, but never backgammon. His knowledge of gardening continues to give us pleasure. I take on trust that he was a skilled and caring surgeon for his hands were put to good use before and after retirement grafting fruit trees and roses in his extensive and beloved garden. It seemed that caring for a garden was an extension of his empathic medical care. These hands never touched a computer keyboard. He retired when the implementation of Medicare would change the way health care was delivered in Australia. A new era was beginning and he was lucky to enjoy a long and healthy retirement, surrounded by family, until his death on 15 May 2005, aged 96.