Joseph Bernard Dawson was born at Solihull on 8 April 1883 and was educated at the King Edward VI School and the University of Birmingham Medical School. He took the Primary FRCS before starting clinical work and qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1905. Even in his student days he decided that he wanted to specialize in obstetrics and gynaecology. He became house surgeon at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Sick Children at Brighton, taking the MB BS degree of London University in 1906. He then spent some time in general practice to make enough money to take the FRCS course at the London Hospital where he also did some research work under Arthur Keith. After further house appointments in Birmingham and London he did the FRCS course at Bart's and passed the examination in 1908. Dawson's next step was to buy a practice in York, but later he moved to Swansea and while there he passed the MD London in diseases of women in 1911. But he was not satisfied with his prospects in England and so he emigrated to Australia and settled in Glenelg, near Adelaide, where he was able to combine general practice with the specialising of obstetrics and gynaecology. At the outbreak of the first world war he arranged with his partner at Glenelg that he would serve in the army for a year, and spent 1915 in a casualty clearing station in France and when he returned to the practice in 1916 his partner went to France. After the war he bought his partner's share of the practice and then devoted himself more fully to gynaecology, and ultimately moved into Adelaide where in 1925 he was appointed assistant gynaecologist to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and in 1930 obstetric tutor in the University. Adelaide University awarded him the degree of MD *ad eundem* in 1920, and in 1929 he became a foundation Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Although he was successful in practice and in academic work in Adelaide, when in 1931 the University of Otago instituted a Chair in Obstetrics and Gynaecology Dawson applied for it and was appointed to a post in which the facilities for clinical work and teaching were at first negligible. It took him some years to obtain the necessary conditions for a sound academic department, but by 1937 the Queen Mary Hospital was opened, and he managed to revise the teaching curriculum so that the course satisfied the requirements of the General Medical Council. The fruit of his labour was a spectacular reduction in maternal mortality in New Zealand. For these services he was awarded the KBE in 1948; he had already been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1934. He was not obliged to retire at the age of 65, but in 1950 he suffered a coronary thrombosis and therefore decided at the end of that year that he ought to make way for a younger man, and was made Emeritus Professor. In addition to his professorial duties Bernard Dawson took a prominent part in many professional bodies. He was President of the Otago Branch of the BMA for 1940-45, and was a co-opted member of the Council of the RCOG in 1951-52 and served as an examiner. He was on the Otago Hospital Board from 1955-62, and for many years was President of the Otago Branch of the Commonwealth Society. Dawson was married in England in 1909, and had two sons and two daughters; one son became a physician in Christchurch, and the other a surgeon in Dunedin. When he died on 17 August 1965 at the age of 82, Lady Dawson and the family survived him.