Peter MacCallum
Australian oncologist (1885-1974)
Sir Peter MacCallum (14 July 1885 – 4 March 1974) was a Scottish-born Australian oncologist and the co-founder and eponym of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
Background and early life
Peter MacCallum was born in Glasgow, Scotland on 14 July 1885. He was the son of Peter MacCallum, a New Zealander, living at Gairfield House in the Maryhill district of Glasgow.
The family returned to New Zealand in his youth and he was raised in Christchurch, his father's home town. He was sent to work at the age of 12. He was able to return to school and continued his entire education through a series of scholarships and part-time work, including working his way back to the United Kingdom as a coal trimmer. He eventually obtained an MB ChB back in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh in 1914, just in time to join the British Army in France.
Career
During the First World War, he was awarded the Military Cross and was twice mentioned in dispatches. In 1918, he was badly gassed, and perhaps it was a result of ill health that his postwar career concentrated on pathology and research.
In 1924, he was appointed to the Chair of Pathology at the University of Melbourne.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7175570. VIAF identifies the subject as 52798229. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1885, 1974, 1914 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter MacCallum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.