AW Craft

Abstract

It is a privilege and a real pleasure for me to present this 29th Elaine Field Memorial Lecture. Professor Field established the Department of Paediatrics in Hong Kong in 1961 and led it until her retirement in 1976. Then followed a long and well deserved retirement until her recent death in England in 2002. It is perhaps apt that my lecture this year has real connections with her, the work that she did and the Department that she founded and which has continued to thrive for the last quarter of a century since she left. Elaine Field spent many of her early years in the North East of England going to school in Sunderland which is barely 12 miles from my own home town of Newcastle upon Tyne. The second and direct connection between my lecture and Elaine Field is her very important academic study published as a book in 1973 "Growing up in Hong Kong".¹ The subject of my paper relates to an earlier study, about growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne. This was led by Dr. F. J. W. Miller and his visit to Hong Kong is recorded in Field's book. Prof. C. Y. Yeung remembers this visit and the long discussions which took place between Field and Miller about how to set up the Hong Kong study. Both studies received their initial financial support from the Nuffield Foundation. Were the findings of these 2 studies on opposite sides of the world the same? We will see!!