Have medical degree, will travel

It was 1975 and the young Canadian medical officer was living in the St Lucia capital of Castries with his French wife, Catherine, who was pregnant, and their young son.

While filling in for a paediatrician who had returned home to England, Brewster discovered a neglected newborn baby named Sophie in a rural hospital.

''I was on a rural visit in the middle of nowhere and there was a baby that had been abandoned and baptised. I remember saying, 'You'll have to find a family for this child','' the Canberra Hospital's clinical director of paediatrics recalls.

''I went back the next month and they hadn't found a family and the child was losing weight and becoming sick, so I really told them, 'Come on, you've got to make arrangements for this child. It is awful the child is becoming neglected in a hospital setting.'''

The child was clearly not being fed properly and was being left lying on her back all day.

''The third time I came back the child was dying, so I said, 'I can't leave this child. I'll take it to the capital.' I said to my wife, 'There's this abandoned child dying that nobody wants.' She said, 'Bring it here and I'll look after it.'''

Two years later, it was time for the family to move on so that Brewster could undertake specialist training in New Zealand. The family wanted to take Sophie with them.

There appeared to be no legal mechanism to adopt the girl, so Brewster approached a son of the local governor.

''Being the governor's son, he said, 'I'll fix it.' So they passed a law allowing us to adopt her and didn't charge us.''

Sophie was now formally part of a family that would live in a series of developed and developing countries as her father pursued his medical career.

The Brewsters have four other adult children: Setha, Philipppe, Sarah and Julian. Setha was adopted from India.

David Brewster has short dark hair, a neat greying beard and a gentle manner. He confesses to a natural shyness that sees him struggling to smile on demand for a photograph.

The 64-year-old came to Canberra this year to fill a one-year vacancy as clinical director of paediatrics at the Canberra Hospital, but with a three-year offer to keep working as a paediatrician and head of research.

It was a big change for a doctor used to working in countries with high child mortality rates, who has written extensively on the treatment of malnutrition and HIV/AIDS in children.

Brewster says it took him the first six months to refamiliarise himself with clinical areas rarely encountered in the 30 years he had spent treating mostly Third World and Australian indigenous children.

One big difference was that in a First World setting there is an opportunity to treat children with behavioural problems.

''Concerned mothers don't get much of a look-in in Africa,'' he said. ''The kids here have to be pretty sick to see me or to get into hospital. I particularly found families coming saying is my child autistic - I lacked the expertise. Because when I trained autism was a very narrow and grey area which has become enormous.''

But he jokes: ''It's good. It keeps Alzheimer's at bay, they tell me, to keep your mind working.''

Brewster was born into a distinguished scientific family in Scotland.

He is named after his paternal grandfather, author of Brewster's law of optics and inventor of the kaleidoscope.

His father Ormond was a surgeon who moved the family to the Canadian province of Ontario when David was seven.

Brewster's 96-year-old mother Anne still lives in Canada.

As a young man, Brewster was not initially interested in following in his father's footsteps by taking up medicine and decided to pursue a career in politics.

He undertook university studies in the humanities in Quebec in order to gain the fluency in French needed to get ahead in Canadian politics.

He arrived in France for postgraduate studies in literature and philosophy just in time for the aftermath of the 1968 student protests.

Although he was politically left-leaning, Brewster became disillusioned with philosophy as fellow radical students used it to justify violence.

''That's when I started to have doubts about philosophy,'' he said. ''It was great to study the history of philosophy. It was stimulating, fascinating - the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to phenomenology, existentialism. I was really quite taken by Sartre at the time because he was really all the rage - not so much since, of course.

''But I was very disappointed by philosophy in France, in part because of all the student radicals, including Pol Pot, who was there at the time, and that group of Khmer Rouge. There were all sorts of shades of left wing represented and many of them had studied philosophy.''

Brewster decided that he was too shy for politics and became interested in medicine, gaining a place in 1970 at the new medical school at Canada's McMaster University.

The school had adopted a new approach to teaching medicine, away from rote learning and exams towards tutorials, problem solving and encouraging students to embrace life-long learning.

''I loved it and I was dubbed the philosopher and hated because I was comfortable with this new thing. They wanted lectures and exams.''

After interning in Canada, Brewster worked in St Lucia, undertook paediatrics training in New Zealand and practised in Samoa, Sydney, Zimbabwe, the Solomons, Gambia, Newcastle, Darwin, Vanuatu, Cairns, Fiji and Botswana.

He has run medical schools in Darwin, Gaborone (Botswana) and Suva, where he wrote a history of Fiji's medical school.

Brewster says he never set out to undertake so many moves.

''Every now and then I regret I didn't just stay in one place, and not just profoundly learn the language but become part of that culture and make a contribution.

''There are a number of people I have met during my career who have done that and I'm somewhat envious. It wasn't so much I planned to do that, it was force of circumstances.''

Those circumstances have included local political problems, the need to undertake training in developed countries and the need for his adopted children to live in Australia to gain citizenship. Brewster says it is not as challenging as many people might imagine to bring up children in the Third World.

''The best schools they've ever been to have been in those places. Believe it or not, the worst school they went to was in Sydney.''

The Brewsters are enjoying their time in Canberra: Catherine is teaching English to international students at the ANU and David enjoys being able to ride his bike to work from Curtin.

They have been pleasantly surprised by the local literary, musical and theatre scenes.

''You didn't get that in Darwin, or Cairns for that matter - high-quality culture access to that because people coming to Sydney or Melbourne stop off in Canberra,'' Brewster says.

But although they had planned to stay in the national capital until retirement, Brewster quietly reveals at the end of our interview that he has agreed to move to East Timor to help train local paediatricians.

The comforts of a First World city are not enough to deter Brewster from going to where he's needed most.

Peter Jean is Health Reporter