Pro patria et spes gentis : military medicine, paediatric surgery and those who care for children

Children and military medicine have many links. On humanitarian and disaster deployments, the surgery of war has increasingly seen children as the focus of clinical salvage. When Romans spoke of children, they used the phrase ‘spes gentis’–‘the hope of the race’. In modern times, there developed a synergy, in the context of defensive war, that its prosecution depended not only on the defence of territory but also on its hopes for continuation of people and culture, into the future. In the 19th century, in Australia, several regiments had the motto ‘Pro Aris et Focis’–‘For the Defence of Hearth and Home’. Hearth implies the family and that implies children. From the point of view of an attending military clinician, the centrum of all medical care is the patient himself, and that centrality is reflected equally in the helplessness of a bomb‐blast or gunshot victim as it is in the vulnerability of a sick or injured infant or child. The life and service of Major General Rupert Downes (1885–1945), whom the Downes Memorial Lecture commemorates, reflected this nexus. His career was that of a national leader in military medicine and that of paediatric surgery. The 2011 Rupert Downes Lecture explores and documents the extraordinary corpus of service of Australian paediatric surgeons and their contributions to military medicine from the 19th to the 21st centuries.