The house, in which the general practice has operated, since 1931, was built some time prior to 1882. A photograph in the Auckland Public Library, taken from the top of Mount Eden in about 1882, shows the house clearly, with its distinctive three chimneys.
The medical influence that was created by Mr Weekes’ purchase of the land lay dormant until the general practice, now known as the Mount Eden Medical Centre, was established in June 1931, when Dr Edward Roche, who had graduated from Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1914 and his wife Barbara, also a doctor (she was an anaesthetist), decided they had found a gracious family home and an ideal place to start a general practice.
Dr Roche started practice in the midst of the great depression and he later recounted, “It was right in the middle of the slump and things were very tough then. No social security and lots of salesmen wanting to sell cars, etc. In our first month, we took 16 pounds (inflation adjusted, equals $1284, today. Ed.)! We stuck it out and eventually it was a big practice. In the first year, we made more money from playing cards, than we did from fees!”.
Dr Renton Grigor joined Dr Roche, as an assistant, in 1936 and then in 1940 moved to establish his own practice, further along Mount Eden Road, where he remained until his retirement, almost 50 years later.
Dr Victor McGeorge, who had enlisted in the Army, soon after the outbreak of war, was “invalided out”, following a severe attack of asthma, prior to departure for overseas. He was then able, on Dr Grigor’s departure, to joined Dr Roche, similarly, as an assistant
Cardiology was Dr Roche’s first love and it is probable that he carried out, New Zealand’s earliest electro-cardiograms, at 457 Mount Eden Road. In 1942, he left general practice, selling the practice and his home to Dr McGeorge, to establish his own specialist cardiology practice.
Dr McGeorge conducted this practice, single-handed, from that time till 1946. During those war years, he added a flourishing maternity practice, extending from Farm Road, Mount Roskill, to better developed, Herne Bay.
In 1946,his great friend and former flat-mate from student days, in Dunedin, Dr Albert (Butt) Adams joined him, having served 5 years with the 2nd New Zealand Echelon, in Africa and Greece and then a year, as a Medical Registrar at Waikato Hospital.
A further Dunedin flat-mate, Dr Noel Wilson joined the practice in 1949, having also been overseas, in Africa and Italy, with the New Zealand Army for five years and subsequently at New Plymouth Hospital. Dr Wilson left the practice for a year’s postgraduate study in Melbourne, in the early 1950s
Dr Adams wife, Daphne, also a doctor, worked part-time in the practice, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the 1950s, they formalised their arrangements and coined the name Mount Eden Medical Centre, for the house at 457 Mount Eden Medical Centre. Thus was established, the first group practice in Auckland and the only one to have survived for so long.
The trio continued together, until the death of Dr McGeorge, in September 1982, when he suffered a heart attack, while at work. He seemed to be recovering well, in Green Lane Hospital, but then collapsed and died suddenly six days after the initial attack. Dr Wilson was diagnosed with advanced cancer in December 1982, dying in February 1983. He continued working, until two weeks before his death.
Dr Tom Marshall had joined the established practice, in September 1966. When he and his family took sabbatical leave, in 1975, Dr Herman Develter, an Irish graduate who had owned his own practice in Derby, England, acted as his locum tenens. On the return of the Marshalls, in early 1976, Dr Develter remained with the practice as a partner.
In 1976, major alterations of the premises took place. An addition was built at the rear of the building at 457 and 459 Mount Eden Road, which had been purchased in 1970, was joined to 457. All this was done without altering the essential character of 457, either inside or out. The heart of the building remains as it was in 1931. No other practice, in New Zealand, has functioned for so long, in the same premises.
Dr Tony Hay had joined the practice, in 1982, after post-graduate study in the United Kingdom and New Zealand experience in general practice.
Following the deaths of Drs McGeorge and Wilson, Dr Andrew Chong, who had been in practice in Papakura from 1968, joined the practice.
Dr Butt Adams retired, in March 1984 and Dr Jan White, who had returned from post-graduate work in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, took over his practice and the group that was to continue unchanged for the next twenty years, had established itself
In 2003, Dr Julie Taylor, already an established practitioner in Mount Eden moved her practice to the Mount Eden Medical Centre and then in 2004, Dr Herman Develter retired and Dr Anthony Tam has joined the team, like Dr Hay, after training overseas and experience in New Zealand. In 2007, following the retirement of Dr Andrew Chong, Dr Michele Cooper has joined the practice.
From the single-handed days of Dr McGeorge and until after the arrival of Drs Adams and Wilson, Sister Mabel Ashby, the first practice nurse and a former maternity hospital owner, supervised the practice. She was the aunt of our pharmacist colleague, Mr John Ashby, of Balmoral. Mr Ashby’s father had established his pharmacy, in Balmoral in 1938 and supplied pharmaceuticals to Drs Roche and McGeorge. John, when he succeeded his father, as proprietor of the pharmacy continued this arrangement until recent times.
A notable and much loved figure in the practice, following Sister Ashby, was another practice nurse, Sister Denise Fleming, who had joined the team in the early 1960s and remained until she, too, stopped work when the effects of terminal cancer forced her. She had worked until some six weeks prior to her death, in 1989.
Following these pioneer practice nurses, the team was ably led by Mary Edgar for a number of years. More recently we have welcomed Tash Hill who previously worked in the Gisborne region. In addition; the latest part of the evolution of the Mount Eden Medical Centre has been the development of professional management and reception staff.
Since 1993, the country
has been exposed to a series of health reforms. The latest has seen the establishment
of Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) and the practice has become part of
a PHO, the ProCare Network Auckland Limited.
