Woman Crush Wednesday: Dr. Dorothy Stopford-Price
Dr. Dorothy Stopford-Price was an amazing physician who played a key role in the ending of the Tuberculosis epidemic. In 1890 Dortothy was born into a family with a long history of involvement in the Church of Ireland. During her youth, after her father passed, she moved to London with her family, where she went to school and spent the rest of her adolescent life. As a young Irish woman, born in Dublin, Dorothy had a desire to go back to her home country for her university studies. She attended Trinity College starting in 1915 and graduated with her Doctorate in 1921.
After her graduation she worked at Kilbrittain dispensary in West Cork. On many of her work trips to “ladies of the country” she also taught first aid to the IRA, treated the wounded during the War of Independence and even treated anti-Treaty soldiers during the civil war. During this time she also became a medical officer for the local IRA brigade.
In 1925, Stopford married Liam Price who, at the time, was a district justice from Wicklow. Around the same time, Dorothy took up a position at St. Ultan’s hospital for Infants, which was operated by one of her former classmates. During her time at St. Ultan’s, she became interested in tuberculosis, specifically its diagnosis and prevention. The desire to help came from her constant contact with the poor communities in the area where tuberculosis was running rampant. She started her research by studying other countries’ methods of handling tuberculosis, and she reached out to the experts in the surrounding areas for help. In 1931 she took a career altering trip to Vienna to visit Professor Franz Hamburger. At the time he was using an ointment containing tuberculin to diagnose TB. After her trip, she returned back to Ireland with a tube of his ointment and a plan to use it to study how many individuals had been exposed to tuberculosis. By 1934 she had been able to administer 500 TB tests using this method. The results she found were able to debunk the myth that most young adults in Ireland had previously been exposed to TB. This proof provided a solid rationale for the urgent need to develop a tuberculosis vaccine.
In 1936 Dr. Stopford-Price took another trip, but this time to Sweden to visit Arvid Wallgren who was using the BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) Vaccination. She was able to study this vaccine and its uses enough that in 1937 she used it for the first time on two infants. This made St. Ultan’s the first hospital in Ireland or Britain to use the vaccine. The Irish public was worried about the safety of the vaccine due to the Ring-Disaster that was happening simultaneously. This came about when a group of school aged children developed tuberculosis after receiving a vaccination for diphtheria.
Shortly after the introduction of the vaccine, the popularity started to pick up, This allowed Dr. Stopford-Price the opportunity to start a National Antituberculosis League in Ireland. Although she had the support of the Archbishop of Dublin, he ultimately objected to the creation of this group due to the amount of protestant Doctors in the league. Even though this initiative did not succeed, in 1949 Noel Browne approached Dorothy about heading up a national committee with the goal of rolling out a large BCG vaccine campaign. This campaign was very successful in eradicating the tuberculosis epidemic in Ireland, but due to many health related conditions Dr. Stopford-Price never got to see the end result of her hard work, as she passed away in 1954 from a stroke. Due to her untimely death, Noel Browne and James Deeny received most of the credit for the end of the epidemic.
Although she may not have received all of the recognition that she deserved, she was nominated for the World Health Organization’s Leon Bernard prize for her contribution to social medicine. She also held some prestigious titles during her career such as, Chairman of the National BCG Centre that was set up in St. Ultan’s in 1949, and consulting physician to the Royal National Hospital for Consumptives in Ireland.
If you would like to learn more about Dorothy Stopford-Price, our information was sourced from The Irish Times, The Womens Museum of Ireland and The Lancet.