The Douglas Gordon Oration commemorates the contribution made by the late Douglas Gordon to public health and is now held in association with the Preventive Health Conference.

Douglas Gordon was born on 19 April 1911 and grew up near Maryborough, Queensland. He began studying medicine at the University of Melbourne in 1931, but the Depression and family hardship forced him to abandon his studies and become a farmer for seven years.

In 1938, he entered the second year of the medical course at the newly established Faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland. He graduated in June 1942 and served as a Medical Officer to RAAF airfield construction squadrons in the Dutch East Indies.

After the war, he spent 10 years as head of Industrial Hygiene in the Queensland State Health Department, before becoming the first full-time professor of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Queensland in 1957. He was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 1962 to 1967. He published extensively, both in the areas of social and preventive medicine and in medical history. He retired in 1976 and died in October 1993.