Tilli Tansey
QMUL, The Society’s Honorary Archivist

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.101.8a

One of the first women to be appointed to a teaching position in a medical school, Maureen became demonstrator in physiology at St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School, and Tutor to the newly admitted women students in 1946, and gained a Personal Chair in perinatal physiology in 1975*.

Her two great nephews and her godson decided to commemorate her with an inscribed bench, placed in the garden of St Thomas’, just across the river Thames from the Houses of Parliament. On what would have been her 100th birthday, family and friends gathered for a short ceremony of dedication, and to talk about Maureen.

The Physiological Society was represented by members of the History & Archives Committee (HAC) Dafydd Walters and myself. Dafydd recalled visiting St Thomas when he was a young student at UCL, and being astonished at the sight of a sheep in a specially constructed cage in the corner of Maureen’s lab in the Obstetrics Department, just yards from the labour wards. I remember first meeting Maureen in the Rayne Institute in 1983. As a young post doc, I was enormously impressed by this retired ‘lady professor‘ (a very rare species anywhere, but especially in St Thomas’), who had a space in the research lab next door and who always, regardless the time of day, or day of the week, wore the cleanest, crispest and whitest lab coat.

Also present was Amanda Engineer, a professional archivist from the Wellcome Library, who has oversight of The Society’s archives, and also sits on the HAC. At Maureen’s memorial service in 2013, I had approached Maureen’s nephew, Michael Young, to ask about his aunt’s papers. These have subsequently been collected and deposited in the Wellcome Library, where Amanda is hoping to include them in the anticipated cataloguing exercise of The Physiological Society’s own papers, an aim enthusiastically supported by the HAC.

* The enormous contributions of Professor Maureen Young (1915 – 2013) to physiology, especially neonatal and fetal physiology, have been noted already in Physiology News (Fowden, 2013) and in the Society’s recent book on Women Physiologists: centenary celebrations and beyond (Wray & Tansey, 2015).