This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 19 July 1923, Ireland
Died: 21 November 2004
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Mary Graham Freeland
McGeown, Mary Graham (Mollie) (1923–2004), medical doctor and health service pioneer, was born 19 July 1923 into a farming family long established at Prospect Hall, Aughagallon; their large farm was partly in Co. Down and partly in Co. Antrim, but the nearest town, Lurgan, is in Co. Armagh. Her father was James Edward McGeown and her mother was Mary Graham McGeown (née Quinn). Mollie had one brother. The family’s circumstances deteriorated markedly after her father died of pneumonia at the age of 46, and during the difficult 1930s, Mollie and her brother had to help with farm work after school. However, she was able to attend Lurgan College, and in 1940 went on to Queen’s University, Belfast, to study medicine. She had an outstandingly successful student career, winning prizes and medals as an undergraduate and in 1946 graduating MB, B.Ch., BAO, with honours. She trained in pathology; John H. Biggart had supervised her MD thesis on sub‑acute bacterial endocarditis. However, though he had appeared to welcome the news of her engagement to be married, later the same day he sacked her from her post in his department, since he would not allow married women to work with him. She encountered further prejudice in a profession still notably misogynist; in 1949, explicitly because she was a recently married woman, she was refused a position at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children. Instead she developed research interests in biochemistry and human metabolism; her Ph.D. thesis was on phosphate esterases in milk.
In 1953 she was awarded a grant by the Medical Research Council, and from 1956 to 1958 she was a research fellow in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, working with the recently appointed first full‑time professor of medicine at QUB, (Sir) Graham Bull (1918–87). She followed several lines of research, developing expertise in management of electrolyte levels in patients and in calcium metabolism, hyperparathyroidism, and causes of renal stone. She was the first woman and the first physician to be elected an associate member of the British Association of Urological Surgeons. At the time, there were exciting developments in urology; dialysis using an artificial kidney held out hope for patients with acute renal failure. However, patients from Northern Ireland, even in extremis, had to be sent for treatment in the Hammersmith Hospital in London, and John Megaw (1913–71), a consultant surgeon at Belfast City Hospital, argued that the population of Northern Ireland was large enough to merit the provision of an artificial kidney. He persuaded Graham Bull and others to back his proposals, and in 1958, offered McGeown the job of setting up a dialysis service in the City Hospital, although she lacked much of the necessary clinical experience. She set about equipping the facility and decided to buy a twin coil artificial kidney, which was delivered to Belfast in early June 1959. There was no time for planned training in England before McGeown had to demonstrate the kidney at an in‑service course in the hospital; she and a colleague managed to figure out the technique by working from the machine’s handbook, using red ink in place of blood. McGeown pressed on without taking time to undergo formal training, and after initial difficulties and much enforced and rapid experimentation and improvisation, the first patient was successfully dialysed at the end of June, though he died a week later of a stroke.
In one of the first major instances of cross‑border co‑operation since partition, McGeown established close links with a haemodialysis team in Dublin, based in the Jervis Street hospital and headed by Joseph Woodcock (1919–97), Anthony Walsh (1922–97) and William O’Dwyer (1916–99). Her own unit in Belfast was increasingly busy, as she recruited a specialist nursing and laboratory team, though until 1968 she was single‑handedly in charge, expecting the highest standards from her staff, but solely responsible almost daily for making almost impossible life and death decisions based on medical and resource priorities. The Belfast unit trained a number of doctors from abroad, later able to set up dialysis units in their home countries.
With new developments in technology, long‑term dialysis offered new options for chronically ill patients, and McGeown developed pioneering expertise in treating immuno‑suppressed patients who had had kidney transplants. She was quick to grasp the implications of new developments, and argued strongly for increased reliance on organ transplantation. At first Northern Ireland patients received kidneys in hospitals in Scotland and England, but in 1968 a purpose‑built transplantation unit opened in the City Hospital. There she and her team developed the ‘Belfast recipe’, a uniquely successful regime of carefully limited medication, intensive nursing care, isolation, and airflow control, which reduced mortality from infection to unparalleled low levels. An article in the Lancet in 1976 highlighted their success in achieving rates of survival of patients that could not be equalled or even approached in any other unit in the UK. Thousands of people benefited from the unit’s work during her career; grateful patients established an important charity to fund kidney research in Northern Ireland.
McGeown made a valuable contribution to the provision of medical services in Northern Ireland. She set out the province’s long‑term strategies for renal therapy, based on reliable data on incidence of disease which she gathered in the course of her ongoing clinical and scientific research, which continued, after her official retirement in 1988, up to 2003, when she reached her eightieth birthday. She published over 350 articles in journals, contributions and chapters in textbooks, and a monograph on management of electrolyte disorders. She had an international reputation and gave many invited talks abroad and in the United Kingdom. She was consultant nephrologist in the City Hospital (1962–88), honorary reader, QUB (1972–87), and was made first professorial fellow in medicine in QUB in 1988. She served as chairman of the United Kingdom Transplant Management Committee (1983–90), president of the Renal Association, council member of the British Transplant Society, president of the Ulster Medical Society (1985–6) and chairman of the Corrigan Club (1987). She received an honorary D.Sc. from the New University of Ulster in 1983 and another from QUB in 1991. In 1985 she was made CBE. The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland awarded her both the Corrigan gold medal (1987) and the J. Creery Ferguson gold medal (1997).
On the 50th anniversary of the National Health Service in 1998, she was named as one of the fifty women who had contributed most to its success. In 2002 a portrait of her by Larry Coulter was hung in the Great Hall of QUB; she was the first woman so honoured. The regional renal unit in Belfast City Hospital was named in her honour.
McGeown managed to balance her demanding career and heavy responsibilities along with equally significant contributions to her family. In 1949, she married Joseph Maxwell (Max) Freeland , a senior administrator at QUB, who was widowed with two young sons, and with him had three more sons. Colleagues were astonished to hear that she never missed making an evening meal or neglected other domestic concerns, though she herself noted ruefully that one of her maternity leaves had lasted only three weeks.
She died in Belfast after suffering a stroke, on 21 November 2004, survived by her three sons and by a stepson.