Page 14 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

From Genesis to Exodus: The Founding of the MRC, 1969–1970

Official luncheon in Pretoria to mark the establishment of the SAMRC, 2 September 1969,
addressed by the Minister of Health, Dr Carel de Wet. Left to right: Professor James Gear
(Director of SA Institute for Medical Research), Professor Arthur Kipps (UCT), De Wet,
State President Jim Fouche, unknown (perhaps De Wet’s secretary), Professor Andries
Brink (President of SAMRC), Major-General E.C. Raymond (Secretary for Health).

expected of his team. This load had become especially heavy within two years of his
becoming part-time president of the MRC in 1969, as in 1971 he was also appointed
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Stellenbosch. Thereafter, his medical work was
primarily clinical in character, with one exception.
The exception was a long-running project which he had initiated even before the
MRC was established, to create Afrikaans equivalents for English medical terms and
thereby build up incrementally an Afrikaans medical vocabulary on a par with that in
English. When the project culminated in 1979 with the publication of the Woordeboek
van Afrikaanse geneeskundeterme, edited by Brink, Vorster hailed how Afrikaans had
thereby been ‘substantially and permanently enriched’ by the creation of thousands

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