Myra Mackenzie, born in Perthshire in 1876, was Aberdeen’s first female medical student. She matriculated in 1895 and achieved her MB ChB in 1900. Mackenzie often fell victim to her male colleagues’ resistance to her presence among them and she was excluded from studying anatomy, midwifery and forensic surgery.
Dr Mackenzie signed to join the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in February 1918. She joined the American unit which Isabel Emslie had been made CMO of as its 2 previous CMOs (including Agnes Bennet) were invalided out with malaria.
Myra must have arrived as Helen Lillie left. Serbia began to reclaim their land during 1918 and in October the unit was sent forward to Vranja where regimental barracks were given them for a hospital. They were busy treating wounded and medical cases of malaria and dysentery and the dreaded typhus, which had taken so many lives in 1915, returned. Myra had previously worked as a tuberculosis officer in Staffordshire and the experience gained there must have been very useful as many of the young Serbian soldiers had TB. Both Isabel and Myra ventured out into the towns and surrounding country where the Serbian peasant population were in much need of medical help. They worked through the Summer of 1919. Isabel Emslie described Myra thus:
“Dr Myra McKenzie tireless hour after hour was the calm and skilful anaesthetist: what a beautiful picture she made as she sat, almost immobile, watching her patient with a gentle smiling face which reminded one of the Mona Lisa”
In October 1919, the unit went to Belgrade where they took over the work of an orthopaedic unit started by Louise McIlroy, head of the Girton & Newnham Unit and subsequently worked in Lady Muriel Paget’s welfare Scheme Hospital in Crimea. Their work eventually finished in Spring 1920.
Returning home, Mackenzie pursued a career in psychiatry and went on to become a superintendent at a hospital in Lincoln. She died in London aged 81.
Photograph: from the family collection of the late Helen Moggridge, nee Taylor
