[6] In April 1901[7] Smith began general practice at Morwell, Gippsland[8] where he was appointed Health Officer,[9][10] with an early task of dealing with an outbreak of diphtheria.

[21][22] Smith was called upon in subsequent years to give medical evidence in court in the cases of divorce,[23] inheritance disputes, murder and assault, accidents[24] and suicides.

[28][29] One of his patients was Tasmanian Senator Rudolph Ready,[30] and in 1918 Albury Anzac veteran and grazier George Robert Jackson bequeathed him £3000.

[31] The couple, then residing in Powlett St. South Yarra,[32] purchased a holiday home, part of Glen Shian on Ballar Creek in Mt Eliza, in 1921.

[41] His long-distance phone consultation with Harley Street specialist in London Dr. Moreland McCrea concerning a life-and-death case was healed as 'epoch-making' and attracted the attention of King George V.[42] In 1936 he retired from practice, but in World War II returned to surgery.

[47] In 1946 the Australasian Photo-Review paid tribute to him; "It is safe to assume that every Australian photographer is familiar with the work of Dr. Julian Smith His artistic genius, his technical skill and his versatility are famous, not only in Australia, but throughout the whole world of pictorial photography.

[50] His portraits are in an outmoded Pictorialist style in a period of the emerging New Photography,[51][52] artistically lit with orchestrated, sometimes melodramatic, poses,[53] and printed with radical overexposure in pyrocatechin developer and bleaching-back with ferricyanide.

Reviewing his contributions to an exhibition of the Melbourne Camera Club in July 1926, The Age newspaper wrote; "Dr. Julian Smith's work in the field of portraiture is quite distinguished by its refinement,"[55] and in a review of a May 1930 show in which his work featured, the newspaper noted that "the matter of tone (spcaking from the painter's point of view) has received close attention," especially in "such fine studies as The Prince, East Is East, and the head study, August Knapps.

[58] Of the same show watercolourist Blamire Young remarks on Smith's determination "to extract from his models the very utmost they can offer in the way of character and presentment.

His lighting effects are still further systematised, and his control of his medium appears to be on the verge of the absolute," hailing his portrait of John Shirlow "as good as anything Dr. Smith has done.

[51] Julian Smith's subjects, his fellow medicos include biochemist Marjorie Bick, virologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet,[63] pathologist Howard Florey,[64] Royal Physician Thomas Horder,[65] anatomist Professor Frederic Wood Jones,[66] Dr. John Dale,[67] Dr. Thomas Wood;[68] and other celebrated Australians aviator Charles Kingsford Smith,[69] Colonel Walter E. Summons,[70][71] Brigadier Neil Hamilton Fairley;[72] writer Robert Henderson Croll,[73] and poets John Shaw Neilson,[74] and Bernard O'Dowd;[75] dancer Sono Osato;[76] actors Gregan McMahon,[77] and Frank Talbot;[78] artists John Shirlow,[79] Murray Griffin,[80] William Dargie,[81] and Lionel Lindsay,[82] photographers Harold Cazneaux (who also photographed Smith),[83] Dudley Johnston,[84] E. B. Hawkes,[85] Monte Luke[86] James E. Paton[87] and F. C. Tilney;[88] politician Alfred Stephen;[89] Gwendolyn M. Bernard;[90] businessman Sir Robert Gibson;[91] Beatrice Baillieu,[92] and community worker and writer Paquita Mawson.

[98] He was also known for dancing to relax between operations in the surgery;[99] writer Joan Lindsay remembered that "trifling eccentricities ... gave Dr Julian his unique flavour.