Emily Siedeberg was a woman of strength and determination, who rarely gave up once she had set her mind on something. Courageous and dignified, she proved herself a model woman doctor for the period by using her professional skills in the traditional female sphere of community service.
Emma Hutchinson (1820-1906) was an important and highly-valued figure within the entomological community.
Florence Dissent was an Anglo-Indian medical practitioner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
She is remembered as a forceful personality, singleminded in the pursuit of her goal to paint New Zealand’s indigenous flora before it was destroyed by the advance of cultivation.
After taking her MD in Brussels in 1894, she worked as Assistant Medical Officer at the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, and also penned further novels and short stories. She has also gained recognition among the scientific community for having proposed the word ‘isotope’.
Awarded a University of Melbourne Doctor of Science (DSc) degree in 1984 for her published papers and made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1989 for her scientific contributions, Weste was the foremost authority on this virulent plant pathogen in Australia.
Truswell had a distinguished career with the Bureau of Mineral Resources Canberra (later Australian Geological Survey Organisation) from 1973, holding the position of Chief Research Scientist in Palynology from 1990-97. She published more than 80 scientific papers, dealing with issues of the evolution of Australian climates and vegetation, and undertook extensive research in Antarctic geology.
Physician and zoologist Claire Weekes was the first woman to earn a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney, and a long-time advocate for women’s rights.
Her book on the plants of New Zealand became a botanical classic running to seven editions over the next 60 years. Several generations of people interested in New Zealand’s native plants were to use it as a constant reference book and a number of professional botanists would credit it with stimulating their original interest.
Kathleen Todd believed passionately that the important role of any doctor is ‘sometimes to cure, often to relieve, but always to console’. This dictum came to have a very personal resonance for this gifted, warm and empathetic psychiatrist.