4299.341 · December 7, 1979 AD
Graduation – Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery, University of Adelaide (1979)
The University of Adelaide conferred its degrees in medicine and surgery on the graduating class at Bonython Hall, the university's ceremonial hall on North Terrace. After six years of training, a year's cohort of medical graduands crossed in a single afternoon from students to qualified doctors, bound next for the intern year at the city's teaching hospitals. It was the formal threshold the longest of the university's degrees had been pointed at — a roll of new South Australian doctors admitted together to the profession.
The University of Adelaide conferred its degrees in medicine and surgery on the graduating class at Bonython Hall, the university's ceremonial hall on North Terrace. The year's medical cohort — six years of training behind them — crossed in a single afternoon from students to qualified doctors, gowned and hooded before the families who had waited the long course out alongside them.
The Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery was the longest and most demanding of the university's undergraduate degrees, and the ceremony marked the formal end of it. The graduands were doctors in title now, bound next for the intern year at the city's teaching hospitals that stood between qualification and independent practice. For most of them it was the threshold their whole adult education had been pointed at.
They were a year's worth of South Australian doctors, drawn from across the state and beyond it, admitted together on one summer afternoon to the profession their training had been preparing them for. The hall had conferred such degrees on cohort after cohort, and it did so again without singling any of them out — a roll of new names read into the medical profession, the graduands walking back out into the summer heat as something they had not been when they walked in.
