Remembering Valerie Beral (1946–2022)

Abstract

Valerie Beral first crossed my path in the early 1970s in Papua New Guinea (PNG). We were both members of a 10-person epidemiological survey team, headed by the late Ruthven Blackburn, Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney. Valerie was a medical student with wide interests. We were based at a mission hospital at Baiyer River, where I had worked in 1968. Ruthven was interested in a unique form of liver disease among the Enga people in PNG’s Western Highlands district. He (accompanied by his wife, Ann Woolcock, a respirologist) and his survey team had visited every second January for 2 weeks or so for about a decade. My first impression of Val Beral was of a warm, blithe, highly intelligent, inquisitive and independent young woman. She was intrigued and undaunted by what was a very foreign environment. Each day, weather permitting, the survey team visited the mountain villages, taking their equipment and records with them. They conducted a roll call of local inhabitants, performed physical examinations and took blood samples. Enthusiasm for liver biopsies ran high, promoted by a local myth that the biopsies were removing bad worms!