MARGARET BARNETT CRUICKSHANK
1897 graduate — second woman medical graduate in New Zealand, first registered woman medical practitioner in New Zealand, first New Zealand-trained woman to gain a Doctor of Medicine in New Zealand
Margaret Barnett Cruickshank and her twin Christina were born on 1 January 1873 in Palmerston, Otago, to George Cruickshank, a Scottish engineer, and Margaret Taggart. They were the first of seven children, and by the time the last child was born their mother’s health was failing. Margaret and Christina helped with caring for the younger children and looking after the house, and after their mother died, they assumed her role and responsibilities.
From the age of 10, they decided to alternate attending school so that one was always home to help the family while the other was learning. The twin who attended school would come home and teach the other in the evening and they would switch every six months. Despite these constraints, they were ahead of their peers by the end of primary school.
The girls went on to Palmerston District High School, where they both did well and were awarded National Board scholarships to attend Otago Girls’ High School in Dunedin. The scholarship paid their fees, and their father paid for their board. In 1891, they were joint dux at OGHS and were awarded university junior scholarships to the University of Otago. Christina followed the path of education, but Margaret was unsure what course to enrol in. She discussed her options with a trusted teacher, who encouraged her to speak to fellow OGHS graduate Emily Siedeberg, who encouraged her to pursue medicine.
At first she was hesitant, but later she enrolled in the medical school. She enjoyed the course and graduated with an MB ChB in 1897. Because Emily Siedeberg had travelled to Britain for postgraduate studies before registering, Margaret Cruickshank became the first New Zealand-trained woman medical graduate to register in New Zealand.
Through a former teacher Cruickshank heard that there was a job opening in Waimate for a medical assistant. She travelled there for an interview, was offered the position on the spot, and accepted straight away. The head of the practice was Herbert Clifford Barclay, and she initially boarded with him and his wife, Ruth.
Her first recorded case at the practice was on 3 March 1897, when she acted as anaesthetist for a surgery performed by Barclay. She continued in this role, as well as seeing patients, until 20 March 1898, when she performed her first surgery and Barclay administered the anaesthetics.
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Cruickshank became a partner in the clinic in 1900, and by 1908 she was performing the majority of the surgeries. She spent most of her time at Barclay’s private practice but she also obtained a position at the local school, and later at the public hospital.68 Meanwhile, she continued her studies. In 1903 she graduated MD from the University of Otago — the first of three postgraduate qualifications she would obtain throughout her career.
Cruickshank did not report any hostility from her male colleagues during her career in Waimate; indeed, after her arrival in 1897 the Waimate Times wished her well: ‘The day of the lady doctor, like the women’s franchise and the labour legislation, seems to be upon us . . . We cannot do less than wish this clever pioneer much happiness and success in the profession she has selected.’
Some of her success in Waimate has been attributed to her knowledge of the difficulties of rural life. She was happy to walk the many miles between clients and, while at their homes, often helped with the housework. Like many doctors of this era, she asked her patients to pay for her services only if they were able to. This trait of going above and beyond was typical of many of the early women doctors but it was exacerbated when the number of doctors increased and many struggled to find paid work.
Cruickshank was a firm believer in educating the public about medical and other matters. After a railway accident in Waimate, the town established a St John Ambulance and medical course, and she was chosen as the lecturer for first-aid classes. The community responded positively to these courses and her colleagues at Waimate Hospital thanked her for her work.
Between 1909 and 1912, a woman doctor writing under the pseudonym of ‘Margaret Faithful’ contributed articles to the White Ribbon, the magazine of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, that covered a range of topics from the promotion of healthy living and nutritional information on certain foods and diets to an explanation of common illnesses. It has never been confirmed, but
Criuckshank is assumed to have been the author — partly because of the nature of the content but also because the articles stopped appearing the year she left Waimate for a year-long overseas holiday.
On her trip abroad in 1913, Cruickshank visited America and Italy and then went to Britain, where she completed postgraduate courses in Edinburgh and Dublin. She also visited the St John Ambulance headquarters in London to find out how she might adapt their courses for a New Zealand audience.
In 1914 Barclay left Waimate on an 18-month sabbatical and Cruickshank returned to manage both the clinic and two patient loads. When war broke out, Barclay informed her that he had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and would not be returning; he was leaving her in sole charge of the clinic. Cruickshank took on these increased responsibilities for the next four years, alongside her volunteer work for the Red Cross. In addition, she was appointed superintendent at Waimate Hospital, which included lecturing.
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In 1918, the influenza pandemic reached New Zealand, and Cruickshank reported that the local situation was quickly getting out of control. She urged the Waimate District Council to raise hygiene standards at hotels and to close public bars to prevent the spread. Her driver fell ill during the epidemic, so she ended up cycling to visit her patients and continued to attend to as many people as possible, working most days and nights. She eventually became ill with influenza and pneumonia, and on 18 November she was admitted to hospital, where she died 10 days later. On 25 January 1922, five years after her death, the town erected a marble statue in her name. In memory of her service, E. Morrison wrote in 1923:
We wish that, in years to be, the story should be told of a woman who was brave, and strong, and kind, and true as steel, who had a heart with room for others’ sorrows, and hands swift and sure in deeds of loving service; who gave her life as truly for duty’s sake as any soldier on the ‘gallant, glorious’ field. She is dead, but her influence on others is a living thing that cannot die.
DORIS CLIFTON GORDON (NÉE JOLLY)
1915 graduate — first woman in New Zealand and Australia to secure a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, first Honorary Fellowship for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
Doris Gordon was born on 10 July 1890 in Coburg, Australia. She and her older brother, Frank, enjoyed a comfortable life with their parents, Lucy Clifton Crouch and Alfred Jolly, in Victoria until the 1893 financial crash. In 1894 their father moved to New Zealand in search of better prospects, and secured a job at the National Bank in Wellington. The family joined him there later in the year, and they lived in various rental homes before settling in their own house at Karaka Bay. The family later moved to Tapanui in West Otago, where they lived from 1905 until 1910.
The family’s German-manufactured Thurmer piano, which they brought from Australia, played an important role in their lives. Lucy Jolly gave piano lessons to local children, as well as to Doris. Initially home-schooled, Doris Gordon was an indifferent student compared to her enthusiastic brother. She briefly attended Miss Shepherd’s Academy for Young Women at age nine and Worser Bay School at 12, where she received her only year of uninterrupted formal education, earning a standard 5 certificate. From 1903 to 1905, she attended St Francis Xavier’s Academy in Seatoun but often missed school to care for her mother, who suffered from heart problems. She excelled in various subjects and received numerous prizes.
When the family moved to Tapanui, Gordon refused to attend the local high school. Her family recognised her unique talents and decided to focus on her music. She became proficient in music and passed the Royal Academy of Music senior exam in Gore in 1909. She also taught Sunday school to a class of 40 children. She felt a calling to become a medical missionary and announced this to her parents:
Do you know what I’d like to do next? I’d like to study, pass the matriculation, and go to university and become a doctor. ‘You study!’ they exclaimed together. ‘Yes,’ I said meekly. ‘And what do you want to do if you are a doctor?’ asked mother. ‘She probably wants to be a missionary,’ said my father, who was observant. He rose quickly to his feet and in a manner that was both a challenge and a promise said, ‘If you can pass matriculation, I’ll pay for you to study medicine.’
With the help of a family friend at the Teacher’s Training College in Dunedin, Gordon studied the necessary subjects, passed the exams and began high school at Tapanui. She graduated from there in 1910 and went straight to Otago Medical School, where she passed three out of four medical intermediate subjects, allowing her to start first-year medicine in 1912, boarding at St Margaret’s College. She excelled in her studies, and despite a disappointing anatomy exam in 1912 and a bout of appendicitis in 1913, she achieved top marks in her first professional examination in anatomy. In order to complete the MB ChB, students were required to pass the first professional examination at the end of their third year, the second professional at the end of their fourth year, and the third professional at the end of their fifth year.
During her training, Gordon developed a passion for improving the conditions of childbirth, particularly for underprivileged women. In 1914 she and her friend Francesca Dowling attended births at night at the Forth Street maternity hospital (founded by the Dunedin Hospital Board for the joint purpose of caring for ‘fallen women’ and providing instruction in midwifery for medical students), and at the Salvation Army refuge home for single girls, which allowed only women medical students to attend births. The conditions at these homes fuelled her determination to find a safe, universal method of pain relief for women in childbirth.
In her final year of medicine in 1915, the military and civil authorities were competing for young doctors and the medical school was suddenly having to supply junior medical officers to the armed forces. This resulted in the final-year class of 1915 having their vacations cancelled and sitting the final exams in August 1915, rather than the usual February of the following year. Gordon had the good fortune to work at Dunedin Hospital with John Tait Bowie, who taught her to use her own powers of diagnosis rather than depending on ‘modern machinery’ such as X-ray machines. She believed her clinical work with Bowie eventually led to her gaining top marks in the medical and surgical final examinations.
On the Tuesday after she found out she had passed her final exams, Gordon received a telegram telling her she was required urgently and was to report for duty at Dunedin Hospital the following day with three other graduates. Within a week all the house-surgeon staff had gone to war, and the new staff were left to sink or swim.
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Doris married fellow medical student William (Bill) Gordon in Palmerston North on 6 April 1917; they returned to Dunedin six days later and moved into a small flat on Pitt Street. Bill, along with the other male medical students, volunteered for the war effort as soon as he qualified, and he left for overseas on 26 April. He rose to the rank of captain and returned to New Zealand in mid-1919 as medical officer of the transport ship SS Pakeha.
In addition to her hospital responsibilities, Doris Gordon took up a full-time position as university lecturer in bacteriology and public health under Sydney Champtaloup. She also began working towards a Diploma in Public Health. In late June she began studying abattoirs, food shops, dairy supplies and food factories as part of her research towards her diploma. She turned down a position at the Department of Health — her instinct warned her to ‘avoid state service, take the rougher, harder way of general practice’.
The director of the Wellington office of the Department of Health introduced her to T. L. Paget from Stratford, who reportedly hated lady doctors. However, he must have been impressed because in mid-1918 he offered her a position as his long-term locum, along with his nine-bed private hospital, Marire, to mind while he was overseas on military service. Theoretically, the practice she had taken over from him was considered a ‘light one’ — until November 1918, when the influenza pandemic arrived.
When Bill came home and returned to civilian life in August 1919, he was able to take over Doris’s locum duties. In 1919 they bought Paget’s Stratford practice and private hospital, and set up a joint general practice which was their base for the rest of their working lives. As she had planned, they developed the fine art of anaesthesia using pure chloroform inhalation, and later they gradually switched over to open ether. During their combined 74 years of using chloroform, they never had one mishap.
In addition, some of their maternity patients were offered ‘twilight sleep’, a combination of morphine and scopolamine, if the patient wanted partial or total oblivion while in labour; but they withheld this combination of drugs if the birth involved twins, toxaemia or premature labour as there was a risk of having ‘puny’ infants. Gordon sat up at night monitoring her patients while they were under anaesthesia. Her own experiences with childbirth and raising four children enriched her medical practice.
In 1924, Gordon sent her thesis, ‘Scopolamine–Morphine Narcosis in Childbirth’, to the London examiners for the New Zealand MD degree. Later that year Lindo Ferguson, dean of Otago Medical School, sent her a telegram: ‘Thesis accepted with commendation, my personal congratulations on the work you do for midwifery.’ She was successful in the clinical test but failed in the written section. She never retook the exam.
In 1922 Gordon became aware of the first ‘rumblings’ of state control of medicine, and she told her father she could not get the Edinburgh Fellowship of Surgeons quickly enough. Her opinion was founded on worry about the government interfering with the interests of doctors. Later, in 1927, her concerns led her to found the New Zealand Obstetrical Society (NZOS), partly ‘to refute allegations that obstetricians were a forcep-interfering pest-bearing coterie’. It is not clear how obtaining a fellowship would change her personal circumstances: perhaps being better qualified would give her more influence over the situation in New Zealand.
Her father offered a loan to enable her and Bill to go overseas as soon as a locum could be booked. Her mother agreed to look after their children, Peter and Ross. In December 1924 the couple boarded a freighter for England, with Bill acting as the ship’s doctor. Each day they did 50 pages of revision in preparation for Edinburgh. They planned to sit their exam six weeks after landing, as they hoped to fit in a study trip to Vienna. They both passed, and Gordon became the first woman in New Zealand and Australia to be made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In 1926 Gordon voiced a need for ‘an association of midwifery practising doctors, similar to the British Obstetrical Societies, to better their work, correlate effort and to speak with a united voice on obstetrical platforms’. The New Zealand Medical Journal reported that an obstetrical society would commence in the spring of 1926, and that the British Medical Association would be asked to recognise it. Correspondence, including the aims and objectives, went out to every doctor in New Zealand. Fed up with the ‘shalts and shalt-nots’ from the Department of Health, 180 doctors signed as foundation members. At the inaugural meeting of the NZOS (later the NZOGS, when gynaecology was added in 1975), held at Otago Medical School on 5 February 1927, Doris and Bill Gordon were elected to the joint office of secretary–treasurer.
In the late 1920s, on behalf of the NZOS, Gordon spearheaded fundraising efforts for a midwifery lecturer at Otago Medical School: they successfully raised £25,000, with the promise of about £6000 more to come. The NZOS was to be consulted on the appointment, and on the make-up of the advisory committee. Gordon’s fundraising efforts only added to the accolades she received from the British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1933: she was one of their foundation members, and she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1935 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
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The Medical Council finally saw that a postgraduate obstetrical and gynaecological unit based in Auckland was essential for medical graduates to gain residential midwifery experience without depending on Britain. Dunedin was committed to training the medical undergraduates. The NZOGS, no doubt encouraged by Gordon’s networking and background work in England on a 1939 visit, carried on the momentum in the war years. On 11 December 1940, the NZOGS held a conference in the British Medical Association Chambers in Wellington to discuss the proposed unit. Gordon instigated a public appeal to finance the postgraduate chair of obstetrics and gynaecology: they raised £101,203 by 1947. In 1946, health minister Arnold Nordmeyer appointed Doris Gordon as director of maternal and infant welfare in the Department of Health.
Auckland eventually got its women’s hospital and its postgraduate professor. In 1943, the US Army built a temporary military hospital in Cornwall Park to accommodate casualties from the war in the Pacific. The Auckland Hospital Board acquired the hospital and, after the war, established an obstetrical unit: the first baby was born there in June 1946. In 1953 Harvey Carey was appointed the inaugural chair of the Postgraduate School of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Douglas Robb, campaigner for improved medical education in New Zealand and later chancellor of the University of Auckland, saw this as the start of medical education in Auckland. National Women’s Hospital (NWH) was officially opened on 14 February 1964.
In December 1953, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London informed Gordon that, as part of their Silver Jubilee celebrations, they planned to make her an honorary fellow of the college in recognition of her services to obstetrics and gynaecology; the only condition was that she must be present to be admitted. She told her family over afternoon tea that she was going to England and that, at the age of 64, she would serve as the ship’s doctor. She decided it would also be a good opportunity to visit the publishers with the manuscript for her autobiography, Backblocks Baby-Doctor, on which she had been working for the past three years. Her son Peter and his wife were in England and accompanied her to the ceremonies, where she was presented to the Queen Mother and, a few days later, to the Queen and Duke at a royal garden party.
In the second volume of her autobiography, Gordon described the open family home that she and Bill maintained at Stratford. After the Second World War they sponsored (and hosted) 32 immigrants from war-torn European countries such as Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, East Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Holland. Their son Ross and his family lived beside his parents, and Gordon was able to enjoy her grandchildren for a few years. She died from a heart attack on 9 July 1956 at the age of 66.
After her death, the NZOGS and the National Council of Women raised £4793 to establish the Doris Gordon Trust to ‘promote, sponsor, cooperate in, and otherwise further the study and/or practices of Gynaecology and Obstetrics’. After the OGS wound up in the 1990s the trust became inactive, but a new Doris Gordon Memorial Trust was established in 2016 between the New Zealand branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and the National Council of Women to promote education in women’s health, including an annual Doris Gordon Memorial Lecture.
