Dr Grace Cuthbert and Dr Naomi Wing

Dr Grace Cuthbert and Dr Marie Wing both become highly respected Australian specialists in their two different fields of medicine after having been Pambula G.P.s.

Grace Johnston Cuthbert (1900-1988) was a general practitioner in Pambula and Eden between 1926 and 1929. She then moved to Wollstonecraft in Sydney to pursue her enthusiasm for obstetrics and infant welfare.

From 1929 to 1937 she served as an honorary medical officer at the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children, the Royal Society for the Welfare of Mothers and Babies (the Tresillian organisation), and the Lane Cove Baby Health Centre.

In 1937, Dr Cuthbert was appointed director of maternal and baby welfare in the Department of Public Health in New South Wales. She promoted meticulous antenatal care and established free baby-health centres. She was to hold that position for 28 years, during which time infant mortality declined dramatically - from 40 to 20 infant deaths per thousand live births. Maternal mortality declined even more dramatically – from 4.9 to 0.35 deaths of mothers per thousand live births.

The programs she developed became models nationally and were recognised internationally.

Grace also encouraged professional women. In 1952, while president of the Australian Federation of Medical Women, she was elected vice-president of the Medical Women’s International Association. And, from 1952 to 1954 she served as president of the Australian Federation of University Women.

In 1950 Grace had met Professor Francis Browne, a distinguished obstetrician and gynaecologist who had written a standard text on antenatal and postnatal care in 1935 and who had been invited to Australia by the King George V Memorial Foundation for Mothers and Babies, and by the NSW Government. She married him a year later.

Before she married, Grace had always maintained that a woman could not successfully
combine marriage and a career. But, after three years of marriage, she was quoted as saying with a smile, ‘It seems to be working out!’

From 1929 to 1935, Marie Naomi Wing (1903-1985) and her husband, Lindon Wing, worked as general practitioners in Pambula. Then from 1935 to 1950 they worked as a general practitioners in Cooma.

They then both travelled overseas for twelve months, during which Naomi studied to become a rheumatologist in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Back in Australia, Marie Wing began a specialist practice in rheumatology in Sydney in 1951, and in 1953 was appointed assistant rheumatologist at Royal South Sydney Hospital. Later that year, while visiting rheumatology clinics in the United States of America and Britain, she came to recognise the importance of providing organised rehabilitation services.

In 1956 the Hospitals Commission of New South Wales approved the formation of a pilot rehabilitation service at Royal South Sydney Hospital, and in 1958 the unit was officially incorporated as part of the hospital. Marie Wing remained as its director until she retired at the age of 70 in 1973.

Her dedication to rehabilitation medicine was recognised in 1976 with the construction of the Naomi Wing Rehabilitation Centre at Royal South Sydney Hospital.

Naomi Wing trained generations of Australian occupational therapists and helped to establish rehabilitation services at many other hospitals throughout Australia.

Naomi was one of the last general practitioners who conducted a specialist medical practice without a higher degree.

She became the Australian Rheumatism Association’s federal president in 1963 and in 1968 helped to establish the Arthritis and Rheumatism Patients’ Aid Society (which from 1976 became the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council of New South Wales). She retired from her private practice in Macquarie Street in 1984.

Photo: Dr Grace Cuthbert Browne