Dr David Craddock

MBBS FRCS(England) FRACS

1936 - 2023

David Craddock was one of the country’s leading heart surgeons, internationally respected for his innovation, leadership and collaboration.

David Robert Craddock was born in Townsville in 1936, the third son, with a younger sister, of Thelma and Edward Craddock, a businessman. He was an excellent student and awarded scholarships to attend Townsville Grammar School.

In 1960, he graduated in medicine from the University of Queensland. His early medical training was at the Royal Brisbane and Brisbane Children's Hospitals but, as was customary at the time, he received most of his surgical training in the UK, where he achieved Royal Fellowships of Surgery in Edinburgh and London. In 1966 he was appointed a senior registrar in Andrew Logan's prestigious unit at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Two years later he returned to Australia, joining Darcy Sutherland at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s cardiothoracic unit.

It seems extraordinary now, but in the early 1970s smoking in hospitals was rife – patients in their beds, doctors on their rounds. In Edinburgh it was forbidden in the cardiothoracic units, so David quietly began a campaign, first with the patients, then his unit’s nurses, and finally the entire medical staff of the hospital. As he stood up to address this as the last item on the staff society agenda, senior staff members including a senior physician put their feet onto the chairs in front of them and started blowing huge smoke rings into the air. The motion failed miserably. A year or so later, David succeeded.

In 1968, when he joined Adelaide’s cardiothoracic unit, it was performing about 100 open-heart operations a year. The addition of David Craddock as a second surgeon undertaking these procedures led to a large increase in the number of procedures performed – and with outstanding results when compared to world best-practice. By the time David was appointed director of the unit in 1977 there had been a seven-fold increase in the number of open-heart procedures.

During this time David oversaw the introduction of coronary artery surgery, which peaked in the 1990s at about 1,500 operations a year. He had attracted a team that included John Waddy, a brilliant cardiologist, and Veronica Cummings, their outstanding chief operating nurse. Their motto was ‘do the work and the funding will follow’.

One of David’s strengths was his ability to establish enduring connections with pre-eminent surgeons internationally: superstars such as Denton Cooley from the Texas Heart Institute, Norman Shumway from Stanford University, Bruce Lytle from the Cleveland Clinic, Hank Bahnson from the University of Pittsburgh and David McGiffin, in Alabama and more recently the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

He was also chairman of the Staff Society of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, chairman of the State Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, on the Board of Cardiothoracic Surgery, and an Examiner for the Royal College, director of the Board of the National Heart Foundation and patron of the charity Heartbeat, founded by Bert Hughes from Whyalla, which raised close to $1 million for cardiac equipment.

By 2001, when he retired, David had performed approximately 10,000 open heart procedures, almost all at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and the unit had performed about 28,000, quite a record.

A gifted sportsman, he played A-grade pennant golf at Royal Adelaide and once played in the Australian Open Golf Championship; a professional had withdrawn the day before the Open and 19-year-old David was offered the spot. But to qualify David needed a handicap of less than three. David’s handicap was three. But that afternoon, he shot a 69 off the stick, lowering his handicap to 2, and he qualified.

Golf, tennis, art, shooting and history were other interests. And racing. Colin Hayes, a patient who thanked David for an extra two decades of life, trained, with great success, three thoroughbreds – Daring Escape, Badinage, and Shadwell Lass – for David and friends, some of whom had been on Colin’s surgical team.

His was a full and busy life but family remained at its core. In 1961, David married Diane (eldest of four Strachan sisters from Ilfracombe) in St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane. It was a happy union that prospered for nearly 62 years. They had two children – a son, Nigel, who died in 1992, and a daughter, Susannah, who survives him with Diane, and two beloved granddaughters, Annabel and Lucy.

David Craddock was an outstanding Australian. He died, aged 86, on 7 April 2023.

Mark McGinness