Albert Coates (surgeon)

Australian surgeon

Sir Albert Ernest Coates OBE, FRCS (1895–1977) was an Australian surgeon and soldier. He served as a medical orderly in World War I serving on Gallipoli, and as a senior surgeon for the Australian Army Medical Corps in World War II in Malaya. His primary school teacher, Mr Leslie Morshead, later Lt Gen Sir Leslie Morshead, CO 9th Div AIF, offered to teach Albert at night school. He studied languages and sciences, and at 18 years sat the matriculation equivalent, receiving 5 distinctions. He left his apprenticeship and obtained work at the Melbourne and subsequently Wangaratta PO while he studied pre med subjects to facilitate his enrollment in the University of Melbourne medical school.

In May 1942 the Japanese moved Coates to Burma. At the Kilo 30 and Kilo 55 camps on the Burma Thailand Railway he cared for hundreds of prisoners of war under deplorable conditions. Coates subsequently described his medical practice at Kilo 55 to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East: in a bamboo lean to, with his only instruments a knife, two pairs of artery forceps and a saw (used by the camp butchers and carpenters), his daily work consisted of 'segregating the sick from the very sick . curetting seventy or eighty ulcers during the morning . and, in the afternoon, proceeding to amputate nine or ten legs'. He was knighted in 1955 and in 1981 was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (Civil) for his "services to the handicapped and veterans". A statue in honour of Sir Albert Ernest Coates is located in the main street of his home town of Ballarat. A laneway in the Queen Victoria Village is named Albert Coates Lane in his honour. On 8 September 2006 the University of Ballarat renamed its student union building the Albert Coates Complex. The Sir Albert Coates Oration is an annual event at the University of Ballarat.