Colonel Esmond Venner (Bill) Keogh, (21 November 1895 – 30 September 1970) was an Australian physician, medical scientist, and army officer who was instrumental in saving thousands of lives from tuberculosis, polio, cancer and other diseases.
Keogh entered the University of Melbourne in 1914, but did not complete his course, as he enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) after the outbreak of the First World War, and fought in the Gallipoli Campaign with the 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance. In 1916 he transferred to the 9th Machine Gun Company, and fought on the Western Front, where he was wounded, and was awarded the Military Medal and Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry.
In 1922 Keogh returned to the University of Melbourne. He qualified as a doctor and joined the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories as a medical officer. In 1939 he joined the Second Australian Imperial Force and served in the Middle East as a pathologist. He became the Assistant Director of Pathology at Allied Land Forces headquarters in Australia in 1942 and the Director of Hygiene, Entomology and Pathology in 1944. In these roles he directed the Australian Army's struggle against dysentery, typhoid and malaria, and he oversaw the production of penicillin in Australia. After the war he directed public health campaigns against tuberculosis, polio and cancer.
Early life Esmond Venner Keogh was born in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern on 21 November 1895, the son of Esmond Joseph Keogh, an estate agent, and his wife Helen Beatrice Moore, a nurse. He had two older sisters, Lesbia and Estelle, and a younger brother, Gerard Basil (Gerry). His father's estate agency business failed and his parents separated around 1900. His father moved to Western Australia, where he became a labourer with the Public Works Department; his mother was engaged to care for four young children whose parents, friends of hers, had been killed in an accident. For a time, Esmond and his brother Gerry lived in South Yarra with their father's brother, Eustace Keogh, a medical doctor. His mother inherited £2,000 () from her father-in-law Edmund Keogh's estate and used the money to buy a property and open a hostel for nurses, which evolved into a nurses' employment agency.
Keogh attended a parish school, and then, in 1906, he became a boarder at Padua College on the Mornington Peninsula. In 1908 he went to St Stanislaus' College in Bathurst, New South Wales. The following year he won a scholarship to the exclusive Melbourne Grammar. That the family was Catholic and the Melbourne Grammar was affiliated with the Church of England was not overlooked, but his mother had converted only before marriage and she put a high value on her children receiving the best possible education. He commenced there in 1911, and the next year he won a half-scholarship for his final year, along with Wilfrid Kent Hughes.
In December 1913, Keogh won a scholarship to attend Trinity College, Melbourne, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne. He studied agricultural science and, under the influence of his sister Lesbia, attended Unitarian services conducted by Frederick Sinclaire and meetings of the Victorian Socialist Party. He was not a pacifist, and served with the compulsory Australian Army Cadets.
First World War Gallipoli campaign On 13 November 1914, not long after the outbreak of the First World War, Keogh enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF). As he was underage, he needed a signed letter of permission from his mother. He gave his religion as "unitarian". He joined the 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance, the medical unit supporting the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Downes, at Broadmeadows Army Camp. On 2 February 1915, the 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance embarked for Egypt on the troop transport HMAT Chilka. The unit established a hospital at Heliopolis, where they treated incoming wounded from landing at Cape Helles. In May it was decided to send the light horse to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. The 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance embarked on the troop transport HMT Menominee on 17 May. It arrived in Lemnos on 21 May and then transferred to the destroyer . which took them to Anzac Cove.
The 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance remained at Anzac until 26 June 1915, when it returned to Mudros to conserve drinking water. It helped establish a hospital there for 200 patients. It returned to Anzac on 3 August to participate in the Battle of Sari Bair. Medical arrangements for the battle were deplorable. Stretcher bearers delivered wounded to the casualty clearing stations at the beach, a distance of about but over mountainous terrain and under shrapnel fire. When they got there, they were not given replacement stretchers, and were sent back without them. Thereafter, many of the wounded had to be carried back on the backs of the stretcher bearers. The 3rd Field Ambulance was called upon again for the Battle of Hill 60 on 21 August. Once again, medical arrangements were deficient
Keogh was admitted to hospital at Fisherman's Hut at Anzac on 26 September 1915 and was discharged on 2 October. By mid-October battle casualties and disease had reduced the number of the 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance's stretcher bearers from thirty-two to seven. Keogh returned to Mudros on 10 November as part of the first stage of the evacuation of Gallipoli. From there, the 3rd Field Ambulance returned to Alexandria on the on 24 December.
Western Front Back in Egypt, the 3rd Field Ambulance was stationed at the hospital at Heliopolis. Keogh was reunited with his sister Estelle, who had joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service. Keogh's father and brother Gerry enlisted in the AIF the following year; the exception was his sister Lesbia, who protested against the war as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. On 7 April 1916, Keogh embarked for Australia again on the troop transport , ostensibly to complete his medical degree. He adopted a new nickname. Henceforth family members and old friends would still call him "Es" but to everyone else he was known as "Bill".
In Australia he put in for a transfer to a combat unit, and was assigned to the 9th Machine Gun Company, part of the 3rd Division, which was being formed in Australia. He embarked from Melbourne on the on 16 August 1916, and arrived in the UK on 2 October 1916. He went to France on 2 November 1916, and went into the line on the Western Front. He was transferred to the 9th Field Ambulance, but rejoined the 9th Machine Gun Company on 7 June 1917 and participated in the Battle of Messines in June and the Battle of Broodseinde in October.
He was promoted to the temporary rank of corporal on 7 October 1917, but relinquished the rank after being shot in the right hand in the Battle of Passchendaele five days later. He was evacuated to England on the hospital ship Jan Breyel and admitted to the 2/1st Southern General Hospital in Birmingham on 17 October. He was discharged on 15 November, and assigned to the 3rd Command Depot at Hurdcott. He joined the Overseas Training Brigade at Grantham on 24 November, and then the Machine Gun Training Brigade at Longbridge Deverill on 8 December. He was awarded the Military Medal, which was gazetted on 25 January 1918.
Keogh embarked for France on 26 April 1918 and rejoined the 9th Machine Gun Company on 9 May. He was promoted to temporary sergeant on 13 May, which became permanent on 24 July. He participated in the Battle of Amiens in August and the Battle of Mont St Quentin in September. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for an action with the 41st Battalion. His citation read:
On 22 February 1919 he was admitted to the 1st Australian General Hospital with Spanish flu. He was discharged on 28 February, and embarked for Australia on the troop ship HMAT Port Denison on 25 March. He arrived back in Melbourne on 10 May, where his AIF appointment was terminated on 9 July.
Between the wars After the war, Keogh decided to become a farmer. He applied for a farm under the Soldier Settlement Scheme in 1919, but was unsuccessful. His father had better luck, and was granted a small dairy farm with fifteen cows in East Gippsland. He moved in in November 1920, and Keogh stayed with him for the first year, working as a farm hand in the hope of qualifying for a land grant himself, but in 1921 his application was again declined, as was his father's proposal in June 1921 that the farm be subdivided to give him a plot.
Frustrated in his ambition to become a farmer, Keogh returned to the University of Melbourne in 1922 to study medicine. It was three years before he achieved a pass for the full year in his end-of-year exams; in his first year he passed zoology and in his second year passed physiology only after a supplemental examination. In his third year he only managed to pass his anatomy exam because Clifford Henry Searby, a member of the medical faculty that he had met while serving in Egypt, intervened on his behalf. Thereafter, Keogh's marks gradually improved. In his fourth year he started clinical training at The Alfred Hospital and he earned an honour in bacteriology. But in his final year examinations in 1927, he gained first-class honours in medicine, second-class in surgery and third-class in obstetrics and gynaecology. He was awarded the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery on 19 September 1927.
For his residency, Keogh was accepted by The Alfred Hospital. But clinical medicine was not to his taste; he preferred the work of a researcher. His friend Ian Jeffreys Wood's father, Alan Jeffreys Wood was a paediatrician at the Royal Children's Hospital, and he wrote to John Cumpston, the Director-General of the Commonwealth Department of Health on Keogh's behalf. On 17 May 1928, Keogh was gazetted as a medical officer in the Department of Health, and he began working at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) in Parkville, Victoria.
Training was haphazard; new medical officers would do short tours of duty to relieve the regular medical officers at outstations. Keogh was sent to Kalgoorlie, Rockhampton, Lismore, Port Pirie, Launceston and Bendigo, returning to Parkville between assignments. In Bendigo, he helped deal with an outbreak of tuberculosis. In Port Pirie, he investigated a reported case of anthrax. After returning for Bendigo in 1935, he established an independent research unit at CSL. Working in collaboration with Macfarlane Burnet and Dora Lush at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, he mastered the technique of growing viruses in the membrane of a fertilised egg, and he published eighteen papers between 1936 and 1941.
Keogh's main interest was horse racing, and a highlight of the decade was backing Wotan to win the 1936 Melbourne Cup at odds of 100-1. He liked Post-Impressionism; he attended meetings of the Contemporary Art Society if he was in Melbourne, and he purchased artworks by Danila Vassilieff and Yosl Bergner for his own collection. Partly this was to support struggling artists, but he genuinely admired their work, and he proudly displayed them in his home.
Second World War
Middle East On 6 July 1939, Keogh and his friend Stanley Williams from the Royal Children's Hospital left for the United States to attend medical conferences in New York and San Francisco. In New York he met up with his old friend Dorothy Blanchard, who was now married to Oscar Hammerstein II, an American theatrical producer, whose production The Philadelphia Story was running on Broadway, and Keogh became friends with its star, Katharine Hepburn. He also met the author John Steinbeck, whom he later entertained in Australia. Their trip was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War on 3 September. They took the train to Vancouver and returned to Australia on the .