By CASEY NEILL
FORMER patients still stop Doctor Norval Yeaman in the street and beg him to return to work.
He’ll turn 90 this year and hung up his stethoscope more than 18 months ago due to failing eyesight.
It was his second attempt at retirement and he’s trying to make it stick.
Norval stepped away from a group practice on Robinson Street, Dandenong, in 1993 and took a trip around Australia with wife Alma, a nurse.
But they soon set up a makeshift clinic in their Narre Warren North home.
“People started turning up here wanting to see me so we ended up carrying on,” Dr Yeaman said.
Alma, who turns 87 this year, said many patients were sad to see them close their doors for good.
“People will stop me in the street and say ‘is your husband going to go back practising?’ and I have to tell them ‘no, he’s not’,” she said.
Dr Yeaman was a doctor for 62 years after his principal at Shepparton High School nominated him and two other students to study medicine.
He spent his first year of general practice in Barhum on the Murray River near Kerang.
“You used to have to do everything yourself,” he said.
“If a patient needed blood, you had to look up the directory and find out who’s the right group.
“You had to call up, take the blood from them and then transfuse them.
“There were a lot more issues that you had to be very careful about because you were the beginning and the end.”
Dr Yeaman’s seen great change in the medical profession.
“When we started medicine there wasn’t even much in the way of antibiotics,” he said.
The Yeamans married and moved to Dandenong in 1953 after meeting at work at the Royal Women’s Hospital.
They joined a practice in Robinson Street and worked long hours – Dr Yeaman sometimes delivered four babies in a night, plus hospitals didn’t have casualty departments in those days.
Alma clocked up 20 years as a nurse at Doveton Technical School and received the 1999 City of Casey Citizen of the Year award.
“I was just floored, wasn’t I?” she said.
Alma regularly paid for underprivileged students to attend excursions.
“The principal used to say to me ‘I don’t know what you come to work for, you give all your salary away’,” she said.
“What I did was what anyone would have done.”
The Yeamans have also raised three children.
Daughter Judy runs the Andrews Centre in Endeavour Hills, a volunteer service for those less fortunate, and received an Order of Australia Medal for her efforts.
Son Leslie is a urologist in Canberra.
“I tried my best to talk Leslie out of doing medicine,” Alma said.
“I said to him ‘haven’t you seen enough of your father?’.”
Daughter Sue from Harkaway is a midwife at Casey Hospital.
“I’m very pleased that they’ve grown up into very nice adult people,” Alma said.
“I think if you can achieve that as a mother you’ve done alright.”
The Yeamans have for many years been heavily involved with St James Anglican Church in Dandenong.
“St James would not be anything like as good at it is now without Norval,” Alma said.
He interjected: “I wouldn’t quote that, that’s quite inappropriate”.
But Alma insisted “that’s quite true!”.
“For 41 years he was vicar’s warden and in those years it was his job with the other wardens to make sure that the church was kept in good condition,” she said.
The Yeamans both shrug off praise, but conceded they had done a lot for the community over the years.
“We’ve tried to. I went into nursing to try and help people and Norval certainly gave his life to medicine and to his patients,” Alma said.
