LAUSR

John Miles Little, b. 1932, is a surgeon, philosopher, and poet, whose scholarship has been central to the beginnings and growth of bioethics and the medical humanities in Australia. As the commentaries by scholars in this volume demonstrate, his scholarship continues to influence and stimulate thinking in these fields. From his school days, Little was the beneficiary of the archetypical Classical or Liberal Arts model of education. He attended the Cranbrook School and then was a resident of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney where he had enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts and developed a growing love of Litterae Humaniores. At age twenty he was invited to the newly built University House at the Australian National University by its first Master, his erstwhile lecturer in Classical Archaeology, Latin, and Classical Greek at the University of Sydney (A.S. Trendall). Here, Little was immersed in an extraordinary, exploratory intellectual environment, created by the daily dinner table and afternoon stroll discussions of some of Australia’s most remarkable scholars from across the humanities and the social, natural, and applied sciences. Thus, even as he transferred into the narrow confines of a medical degree, Little was nourished by an interdisciplinary environment and role models of sagacity, kindness, and vision. Little graduated MB BS in 1959. He qualified as a surgeon ten years later and as an MD nearly a decade after that. He was engaged early in both teaching medical students and in highly technical aspects of research. His studies included (among many others) a mathematical analysis of the importance of the profunda femoris in maintaining the integrity of the ischaemic limb, a tissue culture programme to predict in vivo response to cancer chemotherapy, and a survey of the clinical spectrum of chronic pancreatitis. He published a book on the management of liver injuries in 1971 and another on amputations for vascular disease in 1975. He held visiting Lecturer and Professorships in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and elsewhere and became the foundation President of the World Association of Hepatic Pancreatic and Biliary Surgeons in 1987. From the start, Little was fascinated by the human side of medicine. He was a medical student in the era of Boys in White (Becker et al. 1961) and became a doctor at a time when medical practice was defined and centred in medical authority and when that authority seemed underwritten and extended by the extraordinary technical advances being made in the postwar era. But his Bioethical Inquiry https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-021-10166-4