Pedestrians on Macquarie St. Sydney may have noticed a sculpture of large bronze boar located outside the city's oldest hospital, Sydney Hospital. At the base, it reads: This wild boar has come from Florence to Sydney as a link of friendship between Italy and Australia, in memory of Brigadier General Thomas Fiaschi who loved and served so gallantly for both countries. The boar was donated in 1968 to the City of Sydney, by Fiaschi's daughter Clarissa. It is an exact replica of an original sculpture by Pietro Tacca which has stood in Florence, Italy, since around 1633, and was given the local Florentine nickname 'il porcellino, the piglet'

What bought about the connection between Florence-born Fiaschi and Sydney Hospital and how did he end up serving with the armies of the British Empire?

Originally lured to the goldfields of northern Queensland, Fiaschi eventually set up practice at Windsor where he built his reputation. In 1894 he was appointed honorary surgeon to Sydney Hospital and held this position, with the exception of the time he spent at war, until his retirement in 1911. In 1897 he moved his practice to 149 Macquarie Street, Sydney, but on the outbreak of war in South Africa he enlisted with the Army Medical Corps, commanding the NSW 1st Field Hospital.

The History of Medicine Library holds an illuminating letter written by one of Australia's most famous poets, Andrew 'Banjo' Paterson, which sheds light on the larger-than-life Dr. Fiaschi. Paterson penned the letter to Fiaschi's son Dr. Piero Fiaschi, in 1932. In it he describes meeting the senior Fiaschi in the hospital camps of the Boer War in South Africa in which Paterson was working as a special war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald:

I never met a man that commanded more fully the whole respect of everyone that he met. He was an emotional man and when we were riding into sound of the guns, the first guns that he had heard in the show, he took off his cap and said "I thank God that I have lived to hear those shots fired in action"...Another day there were some wounded between us and the Boer and he wanted to go out to them and asked would I like to go to. I said no we might get shot by both sides and he said "All right if you are afraid, then you do not come". He marched out as stiff as a ram-rod and I skulked behind him grumbling like hell. He had no red-cross flag but luckily nobody shot at him.

In his book entitled Happy dispatches Paterson described Fiashci's famous interaction with Lord Roberts, who at that time had overall command of British forces in the Boer War:

Colonel Fiaschi, in charge of our hospital, is a long, gaunt Italian, a celebrated surgeon, and a regular fanatic for hard work. When (Lord) Roberts came, Fiaschi was operating. Ninety-nine hospital commanders out of a hundred would have handed over the job to a subordinate, and would have gone round with the great man. Not so Fiaschi. He came to the door of the tent with his hands all over blood and said: “You must excuse me, my lord. I am very busy.” “You are quite right, sir,” said Roberts. “Go on with your work. I will come round another time, if you will let me know when it will suit you.” Later on, Fiaschi, with a couple of orderlies, was out looking for wounded in a fog, and blundered right on to an outlying Boer trench. “Come on, you men,” said Fiaschi, “you have no chance. Give me your rifles.” The Boers, thinking he had the whole British Army behind him, handed over their rifles, and Fiaschi brought them in. This was reported to Roberts. A staff officer who handed in the report told me that the old man said at once: “Was not that the officer who refused to come round because he was operating? Give him a D.S.O.” And a D.S.O. it was.

On return from the war, Thomas became honorary surgeon to the Governor-General in 1902 and was later appointed chairman of the board of medical studies at Sydney Hospital, giving the inaugural address on the opening of the clinical school in 1909. On retirement in 1911, he remarked to a friend "When a surgeon has to leave his hospital his life is finished". However he would go on to serve in a military hospital on the Greek Island of Lemnos in the First World War, treating the wounded from Gallipoli, his work ethic relentless.

The Library also holds a volume given to Fiaschi and signed by William Osler, The volume "De motu cordis et aneurysmatibus opus postumum, in duas partes divisum" by Giovanni Maria Lancisi dates from 1738 and is an early work about aneurysms.