He was educated at state schools in local villages including Mitiamo, Lancefield, Dunkeld and finally (from 1911 to 1917) at Kyneton, although from 1913 to 1917 he was occupied with compulsory military service.
He gained a scholarship to Queen's College at the University of Melbourne, where he studied medicine from February 1916 to 1922, when he graduated with a second-class MB BS.
[citation needed] In 1925, Charles Kellaway invited Cameron to work at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research as the deputy director, where he remained until 1927, when he left to take up a position at University College Hospital (UCH) under Arthur Boycott, with the idea that he would return to take over from Harry Allen.
When his time in London was up however he discovered he did not want to return, and he instead took up board with Fred Crewe (Boycott's chief technician) and his wife Alice, with whom he lived for the rest of his life and who remained devoted to him.
[4] Boycott retired as Reader in Morbid Anatomy in 1937 and Cameron succeeded him, although he then spent much of World War II working with Joseph Barcroft at Porton Down studying the effects of poison gas.