Bill Gibson by Allen Tina K

Author:Allen, Tina K
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742242767
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
Published: 2017-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Casting the net long and wide

He implanted kids from south-east Asia who came to Australia with their families as part of the overseas program, so the net from Prof is cast long and wide.

Shaun Hand, general manager of Cochlear

Australia and New Zealand

When the lights dimmed at the after-dinner meeting of the Northampton Medical Society, the first slide was not the one Bill was expecting. It showed him diving bare-bottomed into a stream near Argelès-sur-Mer and brought back memories of the camping holidays he and his sister’s families had enjoyed together in the early 1980s. His brother-in-law Richard Marshall had slipped the slide into the carousel as an ice-breaker for Bill’s talk, ‘Deaf children and cochlear implants’ – a controversial topic in the United Kingdom, because few children had yet received the cochlear device. Eleanor had never heard Bill speak in public before and said, ‘Even as his sister, I could not help but be transfixed’.

Bill relished the opportunity to connect with small groups such as the forty or so doctors he addressed in Northampton. At the other end of the scale were the lectures he gave at conferences, such as the British Academic Conference of Otolaryngology (BACO) and the American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgeons, which both attracted audiences in the thousands.

These conferences were important for making professional contacts, such as the celebrated American otologist John Shea Jr, with whom Bill shared late-night telephone conversations about their respective theories on the cause of Menière’s disease. After attending the Shambaugh–Shea Weekend of Otology in 1992 they travelled from Chicago on to Memphis, where John Shea Jr had been inducted into the Hall of Fame on the same day as Elvis Presley. Bill visited the four-storey Shea Clinic, where he observed Shea performing the stapedectomy operation he first performed in 1956 to successfully restore the hearing of a woman with conductive hearing loss.1

Although some Australian colleagues viewed his attendance at these overseas meetings as self-promotion, Bill believed that he was promoting the standing of Australian otolaryngology and what would become the jewel in its crown: the bionic ear. During talks about his children’s cochlear implant program Bill showed videos of paediatric recipients, including Holly McDonell regaining her speech in sessions conducted at home by her mother Viktorija.

As a result of these presentations, Bill received hundreds of requests each year from medical and allied health professionals from around the world to meet his habilitation team in Sydney. However, this team would soon need to find a new home, due to a crisis with their rented premises in Chatswood. Their neighbours in Anderson Street had complained to the Willoughby council about ‘a brothel in their midst’. Bill went to the council chambers to explain that the young women coming and going from the house were actually mothers dropping off their preschool-aged children. The mayor of Willoughby, Greg Bartels, was sympathetic and guided Bill through this item at the next council meeting. Bartels also assisted Bill with all the paperwork necessary to help him find properly licensed premises.

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