Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny

Constantine Trent Champion De Crespigny was born on 5 March 1882 at Queenscliffe, Victoria, second son of Philip Champion de Crespigny, bank-manager, and his first wife Annie Frances, née Chauncy (d.1883). 

Constantine Trent was educated at Brighton Grammar School and Trinity College, University of Melbourne (M.B., 1903; B.S., 1904; M.D., 1906). In 1904-07 he was a resident in Melbourne hospitals, and in 1907 he practised in the country at Glenthompson. Specializing in pathology, in 1909 he was appointed to the Adelaide Hospital. He continued his interest in laboratory medicine, being honorary director of the hospital's pathology services and lecturer in pathology in the medical school of the University of Adelaide in 1912-19, but began private practice as a specialist physician in 1912.

Trent Champion de Crespigny was comissioned in the Australian Army Medical Corps in 1907. In May 1915 he joined the Australian Imperial Force as a lieutenant-colonel and was posted to the 3rd Australian General Hospital during the Gallipoli campaign. From February 1916 he commanded the 1st A.G.H. at Rouen, France, returning to Australia in November 1917. He then went back to England and in 1918 become consulting physician at A.I.F. headquarters in London. Next year he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and returned to Adelaide.

His standing steadily grew as one of Adelaide's most reliable doctors. He was an honorary physician at the Adelaide and the Adelaide Children's hospitals. He became F.R.C.P. in 1929 and was one of the senior Australian medical men involved in founding the Royal Australian College of Physicians, of which he was president in 1942-44. 

For nineteen years from 1929 he was dean and chief examiner in medicine at the medical school of the University of Adelaide. In 1908 he had started a research laboratory in pathology in a tin shed at the back of the Adelaide Hospital. He then solicited funds from private persons, charitable bequests and the State government so that an Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science could be built. In 1937 it was established by Act of parliament and he became the first chairman of its council.

In 1941 he was knighted and became known as Sir Trent. Four years later he visited the United States of America where he inquired for the university into medical postgraduate education, especially as it affected medical officers returned from World War II.

Sir Trent had married, on 11 September 1906 at Beaufort, Victoria, Beatrix Hughes (d.1943). On 13 December 1945 he married in St Peter's Cathedral Mary Birks Jolley. He died in Adelaide of hypertensive cardio-vascular disease on 27 October 1952.