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Six female Fellows added to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland’s portrait collection
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Six female Fellows added to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland’s portrait collection

In November 1924, Dr Mary Hearn, a gynaecologist working at the Victoria Hospital for Women & Children in Cork, broke new ground when she was sworn in as the first female Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI).

College Membership had been open to women since 1880, however Fellowship, the highest order within the college, remained closed. After a series of internal debates the college changed its bylaws, opening Fellowship applications to all Members “irrespective of sex.” 100 years after Dr Hearn’s admission, over 650 women have become Fellows of RCPI.

Today, six of those female Fellows joined the pioneering doctors on the walls of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland on Kildare Street. The photographic artworks were unveiled as part of the college’s portrait collection during the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's Conference on 16 October, 2024.

Prof Moira O’Brien, then a recent graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, began running that college’s student health service. A passionate sports fan, she became a college medic on the rugby pitch. “I used to go to all the rugby matches, and, because they had first year students with no medicine, somebody had to be there to look after them,” she recalls.

Prof O’Brien is still active in her early 90s as an Osteoporosis consultant. Her story is extraordinary; as a child of doctors in early 1940s Malaysia, endangered by the Japanese invasion during World War II, she escaped on the last boat leaving for Australia, but her father was captured as a prisoner of war for three years. Despite that, she continued to be enrolled in boarding schools, where getting involved with sports teams provided opportunities to leave the school grounds.

By the 1980s, Prof O’Brien had a reputation as a leading specialist in Sports & Exercise Medicine in Ireland. She served as Medical Officer for Team Ireland during three Olympic Games: Moscow (1980), Los Angeles (1984), and Seoul (1988). During this period, she was appointed Professor of Anatomy at Trinity College Dublin.

Many women now achieve Membership of RCPI every year but in the early 1960s, when Prof O’Brien pursued it, it sounds like it was nearly all men sitting the examinations; she is unable to recall a female peer who preceded her. “There were really no other women ahead of me,” she says. “But there were a couple in my year who did the Membership with me.”

Dr Anne Murphy, a retired Paediatrician who worked at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda – and who sadly passed away since her portrait was taken – trained during the late 1960s/early 1970s and described a similar situation where a group of female peers obtained Membership at a time when it wasn’t common.

“In my undergraduate class in 1965, there were eight women doing medicine out of 110 people. That was in the Royal College of Surgeons,” she says. She went on to train in Paediatric medicine and found great mentorship from consultants in the specialty who were all male. “None were women,” she says.

The shift towards women in medicine becoming mainstream seemed to take place during the 1980s. Dr Anne Kilgallen – a retired Public Health specialist, and former Chief Executive of Northern Ireland’s Western Health and Social Care Trust – considers herself a beneficiary of free post-primary education introduced in the 1960s, and by 1985 her Medicine class in University College Dublin was close to 50-50 men and women.

Dr Kilgallen married shorted after qualifying and started a family while working in community medicine in Donegal – seeing up-close the influence of external, socio-economic environments on people’s health. She had ambitions for her career (“I have to say: I was hungry.”) but part-time opportunities to train were rare, until she received funding from the North Western Health Board to pursue a Masters in Public Health Medicine.

“I feel strongly that a workforce needs to work in a system designed to support it, not just one that’s dependent on you being a very clever doctor who doesn’t make mistakes. That’s not sustainable,” she says. In the late 2000s, she transitioned from traditional Public Health Medicine to becoming Medical Director for the Western Health and Social Care Trust, and eventually its Chief Executive – and being responsible for 13,000 staff.

In 2024, are women still experiencing barriers to working as physicians? “I wonder if there are still attitudinal problems for women locked into tight medical specialties,” says Dr Kilgallen.

Dr Fiona Kevitt, a specialist in Occupational Medicine with HSE North East, shares a view that, despite progress, women can still come up against workplace obstacles when choosing to start families. “There are still significant barriers – the required time off being frowned upon, being one. No matter how empowered I think we might be, it is still the women who take on most of the childcare responsibilities. On-call isn’t the most friendly to family life. I think it would be a factor in their choice of career,” she says.

When discussing Dr Mary Hearn’s legacy, and women being celebrated for their hard-working careers, Prof Nadine Farah, an Obstetrician-Gynaecologist at The Coombe Hospital, welcomes the recognition. “I think I deserve it. We don’t do grandiosity in Obstetrics & Gynaecology – we are a very humbling specialty, and we don’t think any of us are more important than the others.

“I would like to think myself a good role model for embracing team spirit and community, and being a trainer who’s there for their trainee. I love to lead by example, and I like to show people I do work hard,” she says.

Prof Farah knows how life-changing it can be to work alongside someone who is an inspiration. During her Obstetrics & Gynaecology rotations in the late-1990s, as a Trainee at the Rotunda Hospital, she became aspired to have a similar career to her mentors. “Everything they were doing sounded very exciting. There were lots of amazing female role models, whether at senior registrar level or consultant level, from who I felt: I want to do what they’re doing. That’s what you strive to be. That’s the example you want to set for the trainees now – to keep them driving, to pursue this career,” she says.

It seems a simple fact of guidance can change people’s lives. When Dr Alida Fe P. Talento moved to Dublin from the Philippines around 20 years ago, as a doctor trained in Paediatric Infectious Diseases, she had to re-establish herself: “The set-up was different.  The immunology of infections in the Philippines, being a tropical country, is way different than what you have here.”

After passing her Irish Medical Council examinations, she quickly received career guidance and encouragement from members of the Paediatric Infectious Diseases community here. While a registrar in Children’s Health Ireland at Temple Street, a rotation with a female professor of Microbiology led a new path towards specialisation, and eventually becoming a consultant Microbiologist at Temple Street.

“These are people I will forever be grateful for because they steered me in the right direction,” she says. “The rest is history.”