At 96, John is one of Australia’s oldest doctors. What’s the secret to his longevity?

When Dr John Wiseman graduated as a doctor more than 70 years ago, it was not unusual for general practitioners to spend an hour with their patients, maybe even two. The concept of mental health was unheard of and Australia’s polio epidemic was near its deadly peak.

One of Wiseman’s first jobs was at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, where children and adults suffering various degrees of paralysis and disablement from polio were lined up in long wards of 20 or 30 beds.

Still working at 96, Dr John Wiseman is Victoria’s oldest doctor.

“We still had, in my ward, five people on what they called an iron lung,” recalls the 96-year-old.

“They lived permanently in a wooden box because they couldn’t breathe. I tell people about it now, they think I’m talking about another world.”

As Victoria’s oldest practising doctor prepares to retire from his job as a Melbourne GP, he leaves a profession and a world immensely changed since he entered the medical workforce in 1952.

Polio has been eradicated from Australia by routine vaccination. Smallpox and tuberculosis have disappeared from his practice. There’s also much more paperwork and less time with patients, who are more educated and have higher expectations.

The only child of Polish German parents who immigrated to Australia in the 1930s, Wiseman studied medicine at the University of Melbourne, before embarking on a long and varied career.

As a young man, he spent six months working in the Middlesex Hospital in London after hitching a month-long ride to England as the resident doctor on a passenger ship.

Wiseman married a nurse named Moreen in 1955. The pair had five children together, and spent about 16 years working in the then rapidly expanding industrial town of Morwell in Victoria’s south-east.

Their job was not unlike that depicted in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the 1950s and 1960s, when doctors and nurses spent far more time in their patients’ homes, and in the community.

Wiseman was a “jack of all trades”, delivering babies, giving anaesthetic and treating motor accident victims. People would call his home at all hours, where his medically trained wife was his receptionist and would dispatch advice if he wasn’t there.

“If somebody rang up [at night] and they were sick, you got up, got in your car, and went to see them,” he says.

“Every day was different. Every day brought something new and unexpected.”

Moreen died several years ago, aged in her 90s. Despite not yet being retired, Wiseman now lives in a unit in a retirement village in Melbourne’s south-east, with his dog Martha, a pug.

Every Monday and Thursday Wiseman and Martha are picked up by a taxi. Martha is delivered first to her doggy daycare and then Wiseman to work at Medi7 St Kilda Road, a GP clinic on the fringe of the central business district.

His colleague Dr Tony Helman, who was born the same year Wiseman graduated from medicine, said Wiseman was an inspiration to him, retaining a sharp medical mind and a twinkle in his eye.

Helman said Wiseman was much loved by his patients, and he’d even sent members of his own family to see him.

“I don’t think a doctor can pay another doctor a higher compliment.”

Wiseman said one of the biggest changes to general practice he’d seen over his career had been to attitudes to mental health, which until 30 years ago wasn’t an overt consideration of doctors, and was usually managed within families.

Even for polio patients, facing lifelong impacts of the disease, he said the focus was on the physical symptoms. Though Wiseman noted that in those days, the doctor had more time to spend with patients.

“We would spend an hour, two hours, talking to them, trying to get them to realise what they have to face up to. But we had the time to do that. We weren’t busy looking at pieces of paper, and checking the computer.”

Now mental health is “the big thing”. The world is more complicated, people have to manage more demands and have higher expectations of their lives, he reflected.

Having well surpassed Australia’s current median retirement of about 64 years, Wiseman is finally preparing to hang up the stethoscope this year. At 96, he’s Victoria’s oldest practising doctor, and one of the oldest still working in Australia.

What’s the secret to his longevity?

“I’m buggered if I know, maybe I’m just an idiot,” he replies, with a grin.

“I suppose I do something I like doing. I’ve always said to my patients ‘look, if you stop enjoying what you’re doing, quit it for God’s sake and do something else’.”

But he’s quick to correct any notion that he is retiring altogether. He plans to keep busy, with plenty of volunteer work.

“If you don’t do something when you’ve still got your noodle [he says while pointing to his brain], you’re going to be too late to do anything.”

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