Name Elsie Dalyell | ||
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Elsie Jean Dalyell OBE (13 December 1881 – 1 November 1948) was an Australian medical doctor who specialised in pathology. During World War I, she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps across Europe, and was appointed an Officer of Order of the British Empire upon the conclusion of the war.
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Early life
Dalyell was born in Newtown, New South Wales to James Melville Dalyell, a mining engineer, and Jean McGregor in 1881. She attended Sydney Girls' High School and subsequently the University of Sydney, where she studied arts and science for a year before transferring to medicine in 1906. During her time at the university, she was a resident of The Women's College. She received her Bachelor of Medicine in 1909—becoming one of the first women in the faculty to graduate with first class honours—and completed a Master of Surgery in 1910.
Career
Dalyell's first professional position was as a resident medical officer at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. In 1912 she became the first Australian woman to receive a Beit Memorial Fellowship for Medical Research, which took her to London to complete research at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. When World War I broke out, she left the institute to join the war effort; she ended up in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1915 to help in managing the typhus epidemic of the time. She joined the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service in 1916 and the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1917—together, these commitments took her to France, Greece, Malta and Turkey. In 1919 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) and was decorated by the Government of Serbia.
Dalyell then took up a senior clinician role with a research group in Vienna led by Harriette Chick. After completing extensive research on paediatric malnutrition-related diseases, she returned to Sydney to find she had very few job opportunities. Her attempt to open a private practice failed, and she was eventually hired by the New South Wales Department of Public Health as a microbiologist in 1924 and was a committee member of the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children from 1925 to 1935.
Later life
In her later life, Dalyell lived in Greenwich, New South Wales. She retired in 1946 and died on 1 November 1948 of hypertensive heart disease complicated by a coronary occlusion.