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Emeritus Consultants Biographies
Rolf ten Seldam was born on 2nd April, 1906 in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies, the only son of the highly decorated General R. ten Seldam. He graduated MD from the University of Leiden in 1932 and in 1936 was appointed Director of the Dutch East Indies Cancer Institute in Bandung, Java. As a Captain in the reserve of the Dutch East Indies Army he was called up during the War. He was captured by the Japanese and spent three and a half years in prisoner-of-war camps. The hardship and degradation suffered during these years did not subdue him and he was mentioned in dispatches for distinguished conduct during internment. At the end of the war he returned to Holland and in 1946 was appointed Director of Pathology to a group of hospitals in Eindhoven. In 1951 he came to Australia with his family and was appointed Senior Lecturer in Pathology at Sydney University. He was made Reader in Pathology in 1956 and later that same year was appointed Foundation Professor of Pathology in the University of Western Australia and Head of the Department of Pathology at the Royal Perth Hospital. From the moment of his arrival in Perth, ten Seldam showed a vigour and enthusiasm which to some was overawing but which was the stuff that resulted in the establishment of a first class department. He was a man of unusual vigour, interested in a wide range of subjects and with a particular interest in the geographic distribution of disease and cancer. On arrival in Perth he quickly welded a team with expertise in different facets of investigative pathology. He was one of the old school who believed that pathology was the most important discipline in medicine and that pathologists were the conscience of the hospital. To his staff he gave total and unremitting loyalty; in return he expected and received similar loyalty. In 1965 he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine for a term of two years. He was an enthusiastic committee man. Soon after his arrival in Sydney he was selected to serve on the New South Wales Cancer Council and to act as secretary of the Section of Pathology in the British Medical Association. In Perth he was appointed Vice-President for Oceania in the International Union against Cancer and later as Chairman of the W.H.O. Committee for Skin Tumours. In 1960, the country of his birth acknowledged his achievements by awarding him a high honour - Officer of the Orange Nassau Order. Rolf ten Seldam was a Foundation Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of England. Foundation Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia, Fellow, International Academy of Tropical Medicine. He was a big man; imposing, always smoking and talking and to some quite frightening. His presence tended to dominate meetings; he was a clear thinker and had an impressively retentive memory and was also a great organiser. He became an Australian citizen and was very proud of this. Outside of medicine his other interest was horticulture. He was an expert in the cultivation of gerberas, hippeastrums and African violets. He and his wife Marv have two sons; one is a doctor and the other a farmer. Rolf ten Seldam retired in 1972. He died in 1982. |
