A Slice of Life

The Lane was privileged to host Dr Lawson‑Smith for the launch of his memoir on Thursday evening at the Claremont Yacht Club. His son, A/Professor Matthew Lawson‑Smith, put his father under the microscope in a confluence of two eras of medicine — a brilliant night rich with hilarious medical anecdotes and the brutalities of surgical life in Perth through the last four decades and abroad (Photos of the evening are provided below.)

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NICK'S REVIEW

Well known Perth General Surgeon Dr Christopher Lawson‑Smith begins his memoir not with triumph but with truth — childhood asthma that left nights long and breath short; years of boarding‑school austerity; and the early loss of a father whose influence threads quietly through the narrative. He recounts these origins with a restraint that gives them weight, describing hardship not for drama but for clarity. His turn toward medicine — sparked by the confronting public‑health realities he encountered abroad — unfolds with the calm decisiveness of someone choosing usefulness over spectacle.

His clinical years are portrayed with a striking combination of candour and humour: the kind that distils chaos into insight without making light of the people within it. The early medical‑school episodes — the now‑legendary fluid‑balance experiment, the earnest student dissecting delicate anatomy over lunch — appear not as gags but as windows into a training culture that was earnest, eccentric, and occasionally unhinged. In the operating theatre, mishaps sit beside moments of genuine gravity: a consultant felled by a shifting surgical light; a supposedly “difficult” patient revealed to be gravely ill. Lawson‑Smith’s eye for human behaviour is unblinking yet generous, and his tone carries the precision of someone who values truth over flattery.

What elevates the memoir is the steady moral foundation beneath the anecdotes. Lawson‑Smith treats patients as people first, colleagues with courtesy even when their actions invite a raised eyebrow, and his family — particularly Christine — with gratitude expressed in understatement rather than flourish. Through remote hospitals, crowded emergency rooms, and the great teaching centres abroad, he never loses sight of the quiet dignity that underpins the work: that medicine, at its core, is a long apprenticeship in humility. The humour lightens but never diminishes; the reflection is firm but never harsh. The result is a memoir that feels both lived‑in and level‑headed — the portrait of a surgeon shaped in an era of minimal technology, maximal humanity, and unwavering commitment to the craft.