"When I was just a boy, about 15, he asked me if I would like to come to the hospital and see him operate and I was very keen.
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"As I was going into the operating theatre, his advice to me was, `if you faint, fall backwards, don't fall on my patient'."
Young Frank Madill didn't realise at the time but he'd just heard the quote that was to become the title of his first book.
If you Faint, Fall Backwards - Medicine: Warts And All, by Frank Madill, will be launched officially, in Launceston, tonight - and there lies another Madill story.
"Old Harry Cooper is going to do the launch for me, my brother is coming over from Melbourne, too; I only have one brother," Dr Madill said.
"He and Harry are old mates - in fact, some of Harry's early shots (for his TV vet's show) are filmed in my brother's surgery."
During a long Tasmanian political career and an even longer career as a GP, Dr Madill was renowned for his stories.
So he was surprised when he finally sat down to write the reminiscinces of an interesting life about two years ago at how hard it was to transfer the stories to paper.
His daughter Christine Couche, a doctor of literature rather than medicine, said that her father's first attempts were scientific, stilted and sterile.
As her father's literary editor, she gradually coaxed the famous Madill stories on to paper so that the 300 pages have become a delightful social history - the humorous and often heart- wrenching experiences of a Tasmanian GP.
He was prompted to start when his mother - his only link with his father who died when he was young - had a stroke from which she didn't recover enough to tell him the stories of his own childhood and before.
"I thought that I'd write something about 200 pages long but once I started it just got bigger and bigger and I was up to about 450 pages before I knew it," Dr Madill said.
With help from Christine, it finished a manageable 320 with sketches by local artist Josie Riches and a cover and lay-out designed by the writer.
The hardest stories to tell were the most personal about meeting and marrying his wife Linda, Dr Madill said.
"Other people's stories were much easier to tell," he said.
Like the one about Bob Brown, the future Greens leader who came to work at Dr Madill's northern suburbs practice as a young locum from Victoria, completing his rounds on a push bike which he also later rode to and from his home at Liffey.
Dr Madill says, in If You Faint, Fall Backwards, that it was a warm Sunday afternoon when his partner in the practice, Brian Driver, pulled up outside his Egan St home, jumped out and rushed across the lawn to his startled fellow GP.
"We're ruined," he (Dr Driver) gasped, red in the face. "The practice is ruined.
"We're going to be ruined," Brian went on, waving his hands in the air. "Brownie has gone to The Examiner and told them he is a homosexual."
"Good grief," thought Dr Madill, "our Dr Bob Brown?"
Both the practice and Dr Brown successfully survived the startling 1970s disclosure, as both history and Dr Madill have revealed.