There were nights in the little West Gippsland town of Neerim South when anxious parents brought ailing children to the only doctors in the village, begging treatment.

Maybe the child needed an appendix removed, or perhaps there’d been an accident requiring surgery.

John Murtagh and his wife Jill, both doctors, had three children of their own, but they never turned anyone away.

Jill and John Murtagh with two of their children, Julie and Paul, outside their country practice in Neerim South in the 1970s.

They simply asked the concerned parents to stay and look after their sleeping children while they drove their little patient to the new bush nursing hospital down the other end of town.

There, John performed the necessary operation while Jill administered the anaesthetic.

Here then, for a decade during the 1970s, was the quintessential country practice.

The Murtaghs brought babies into the world, treated townsfolk and farming families for all manner of illnesses, injuries and trauma, and gentled the elderly and the mortally ill into the beyond.

The practice was attached to their family home.

There was no clocking off. Illness and misadventure have no timetable, and who else was going to save those who needed saving?

The Murtaghs were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Patients who couldn’t find the money for treatment in those pre-Medicare days were never turned away. One fellow arrived at the surgery’s doorstep offering a bag of potatoes in lieu of payment, and it wasn’t unknown for produce from district gardens to appear, Dr Jill Murtagh recalls.

The people of Neerim South and the lovely rolling hills around were blessed.

They could not know just how blessed.

John Murtagh – who started his working life as a

© The Age