To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’re sharing the stories of some inspirational Australian doctors.-
By Lyida Hales, Australian Doctor
Professor Helen Milroy
Our early experiences — and those of relatives before us — shape our lives, for better or worse.
Professor Helen Milroy, a descendant of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of WA, knows this well.
Graduating from the University of WA in 1983, she became Australia’s first Indigenous doctor.
During her early career Professor Milroy worked as a GP and as a forensic medical officer in a child sexual abuse clinic at the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children.
It was while caring for traumatised children, who she said were being failed by the system, that she became determined to get the medical training she needed to help them, eventually completing advanced training in child and adolescent psychiatry.
She has always been a vocal advocate for Indigenous healthcare and a vocal critic of the on-going racism Aboriginal people face.
In 2014, she wrote of the “malignant grief” permeating Indigenous culture and peoples, what she defined as the irresolvable, collective and cumulative grief over multiple generations.
“The grief has invasive properties, spreading throughout the body,” she said. “Many of Australia’s Aboriginal people eventually die of this grief.”
More recently she was appointed to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as well as the AFL’s first Indigenous commissioner.
But Professor Milroy paved the way for other high-profile Indigenous doctors, including Dr Mark Wenitong and Dr Kelvin Kong.
And she has seen the rise of the new generation, doctors such as Dr Kali Hayward.
Today, there are some 200 Indigenous doctors across all medical specialties and more than 300 Indigenous medical students in training.
“My family was so proud,” Professor Milroy once said. “I remember when we would go shopping, my grandmother would go up to strangers in a shopping centre and say, ‘That’s my granddaughter; she’s going to be a doctor’.”
Dr Lilian Cooper
Luckily for medicine, Dr Lilian Cooper proved to be bad at taking advice she disagreed with.
As a privately educated teenager in England, she wanted to be a doctor, but her parents argued she should stay at home until she married.
She refused, starting her training in medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1886.
She subsequently sat exams at the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow.
In 1891, she travelled to Brisbane — where she was the first registered female doctor in the state — and specialised in diseases of women and children.
When WWI broke out, neither her home nor adopted countries wanted the services of a female doctor.
So she volunteered for the Scottish Women’s Hospital near the frontlines in Macedonia instead.
Dr Cooper returned to practise in Brisbane with a Serbian medal for her service.
One contemporary account described her in the following way: “As a surgeon, [she] displays a skill, a coolness and a celerity which is not readily understood by those who have not learned that some women can in an emergency, summon up a nervous force and willpower above that of the other sex.
“She has worn down all that barbaric opposition which once existed against her in her capacity as a lady doctor, by sheer good nature and hard work.”
She died in 1941 in the home she shared with her partner, Mary Josephine Bedford.
Remembered not only for her medical skills and achievements, she was reportedly also fond of swearing, dressing in no-nonsense clothing and driving her yellow car with something of a lead foot.
Dr Dagmar Berne
When the University of Sydney allowed women to study medicine in 1885, a determined young Dagmar Berne became the first woman to enrol in medicine in Australia.
The path came at great personal cost.
The university’s vice-chancellor at the time reportedly said that no woman would graduate in medicine while he held the position — and that held for Dr Berne.
The dean, Sir Professor Thomas Stuart, was also no fan either.
Acknowledging women had “played a useful part in medical life”, the professor of physiology who was known as an arrogant recluse, believed there were limits.
“The proper place for women is the home, and the proper function for a woman is to be a man’s wife and for women to be the mothers of our future generations,” he said.
“I thought they would be much better employed if they got a nice frock and a nice man.
“While there is a place for a certain number of women in medicine, there are certain limitations of usefulness, and they will never, in my opinion, take the place of, or be equal to, men in general medical work.”
So Dr Berne left the country to enrol at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1890.
Her meagre food and damp accommodation there worsened her already poor health, contributing to frequent cases of pleurisy and pneumonia.
Moving to Edinburgh, in 1893 she secured the ‘Scottish Triple’: with licentiates from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
Finally, after work in UK hospitals, she returned to Sydney in 1895 and became the second woman to register with the Medical Board of NSW.
She established a private medical practice in Macquarie Street in 1896 and dedicated herself to helping underprivileged girls.
She died of TB in 1900, at just 35 years old.
Dr Catherine Hamlin
“We were appalled by the sadness of our first fistula patient: a beautiful young woman in urine-soaked ragged clothes, sitting alone in our outpatients department away from the other waiting patients.”
This is Dr Catherine Hamlin describing her reaction when she and her husband Reg first arrived in Ethiopia in 1959 in a trip which would transform her life as well as the lives of thousands of women she would care for.
It was only supposed to be a three-year stay for the couple, who were travelling under a contract with the Ethiopian Government.
But they were outraged by what they saw while working in the country as obstetrician-gynaecologists — the sight of women who had experienced obstetric fistulas who had been ostracised as ‘ruined’, forced into begging, dying prematurely or living terrible lives in isolated huts.
Starting work from the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital in Addis Ababa, they refined the surgical technique of repairing obstetric fistulas and ended up treating 300 women over a three-year period.
They eventually built a hostel with internationally donated money on the grounds of the hospital in 1962 to cope with the influx of women who’d heard news of the fistula ‘cure’.
In the 60 years since the Hamlins arrived in Ethiopia, more than 60,000 women have been treated for free by their teams — with the Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia organisation growing into a network of more than 550 Ethiopian staff across six hospitals.
“My work is a labour of love. I love being in Ethiopia. I want to die there at my hospital and be buried there alongside my husband,” said Dr Hamlin, who turned 95 in January 2019.
“I feel that I still have a job to do in raising funds for my hospitals and training programs for nurses and midwives and gynaecologists and to attract doctors trained in caesareans … I want the world to know that there are thousands of suffering and shunned women still and that something can be done about it.”
Dr Catherine Hamlin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and 2014, is a Companion of the Order of Australia and was named a National Living Treasure of Australia.
Professor Fiona Wood
Professor Fiona Wood has described herself as a “clinical coalface worker”.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the response to the bloodshed resulting from the 2002 Bali Bombings.
Professor Wood co-ordinated four operating theatres, and with her team, treated 28 victims, some of whom had burns to more than 90% of their bodies.
The treatment involved taking basal cells from a small skin biopsy near a burn and combining them with an enzyme solution that can then be sprayed onto the wound — covering an area up to 80 times the size of the biopsy.
The approach would become famous, known colloquially as ‘spray on skin’. While it had been developed some years before — the result of Professor Wood’s collaboration with medical scientist Marie Stoner at the Royal Perth and Princess Margaret hospitals — it had not been widely used and was considered experimental.
But it helped save the lives of 25 people.
In a later interview, Dr Wood said: “It was one of those times when you learn a lot about people and about yourself. We’d planned things, we’d been into disaster planning, so it was something that we were prepared for.
“People kept saying to me, ‘Isn’t this terrible! Is it really hard?’ I would say, ‘No. It’s not really hard, because we’ve trained for this. This is what we do.’”
Born to a coal miner and teacher in Yorkshire in 1958, Professor Wood originally had dreams of running in the Olympics but instead took an academic path, graduating from the St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School in London in 1981.
She worked with burns patients in England before moving to Perth in 1987.
In 2005, she was named Australian of the Year.
She was also named a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003 and has been recognised as a National Living Treasure of Australia for her work.
