Born: 11 November 1896, Ireland
Died: 16 February 1984
Country most active: Ireland, India
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Nolan, Margaret Mary (1896–1984), obstetric surgeon, gynaecologist and missionary nun, was born on 11 November 1896 at Collon House, Carrigeen, Moone, Co. Kildare, the only child of Edward Nolan and his wife Maria (née Monahan), who farmed there. They had married on 3 February 1896 at St Thomas Xavier Church, Gardiner Street, Dublin. In 1901 the family was living at Collon with a domestic servant and two farm labourers.
Nolan was educated at Immaculata, the boarding school for girls at St Mary’s Dominican Convent, Cabra, from 1908 to 1914. Fluent in Irish, Nolan was living with her mother at 43 Wellington Road, Dublin, when she matriculated to University College Dublin (UCD) in 1915 and graduated in October 1918 (BA). An accomplished musician, in 1916 Nolan became an associate of the Royal College of Music in London, from which she gained a Licentiate in Pianoforte (1918) and the Teachers Diploma. Studying medicine at UCD, in 1925 she graduated Bachelor of Medicine (MB), Bachelor of Surgery (B.Ch.) and Bachelor of Arts in Obstetrics (BAO). For a time in the 1920s Nolan was involved in the operation of a nursing home from the family property at 13/14 Earlsfort Terrace. She also spent a brief period in India as medical officer in charge of St Catherine’s Hospital, Rawalpindi, Punjab, run by the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. Appalled by the complete lack of medical training displayed by the nuns, she soon left.
Returning to London, she studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, gaining both a Diploma in Public Health (DPH) and a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1927. Postgraduate surgical and medical training at the University of Paris, and later at the University of Berlin, contributed to her gaining a Master of Obstetric Art (MAO) degree from UCD in 1932 and fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Membership of the British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a Master in Surgery (M.Ch.) degree from UCD followed in 1933.
Nolan then returned to India, registering with the Medical Council of Mysore in 1934, and was resident surgeon at the Dufferin Fund’s Eden Hospital, Calcutta. (The marchioness of Dufferin and Ava established the fund in 1885, when her husband was viceroy, to build hospitals for women in India and train women doctors to staff them.) There, Nolan gained further surgical experience, managing a wide range of challenging abdominal surgery cases. Nolan then served as medical officer to the Women’s Medical Service, and for a time at Ishwari Memorial Hospital, Benares. Arising from her work there, in 1935 she published ‘A short account of ten cases of eclampsia treated by intravenous injections of magnesium sulphate’ in the Indian Medical Gazette. She resumed her surgical post at Eden Hospital and was then medical officer in charge at the Dufferin Hospital, Bareilly.
Nolan returned to Ireland in 1939 and on 16 July of that year joined the Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM) order in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Until 1936 catholic canon law forbade women religious to qualify or work as doctors or midwives, construing such practice as inimical to their vows of chastity and obedience. The MMM was founded soon after this ban was rescinded by the papal instruction Constans ac sedula, and Nolan was the first qualified doctor to join the order. She undertook her novitiate at Rosemount, the order’s residence in Drogheda. Nolan gifted her car to the order, which Máire Martin, the order’s founder and mother superior, then used to travel around Ireland interviewing potential entrants, fundraising and promoting the order. Nolan’s mother came to live amongst the order in 1939, until her death in Drogheda on 2 August 1943.
As well as undertaking the domestic chores required of all entrants, Nolan contributed to the development of the order’s Noviciate Maternity Hospital (later to become Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital) in Drogheda, established in 1940. As medical officer in charge and obstetrician, she was essential to the hospital’s recognition by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In 1944 she was made a fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland and the Royal Society of Medicine, London. She was professed in Drogheda in September 1942 and in summer 1945 was dispatched to St Luke’s Hospital, Anua, Uyo, in south-east Nigeria as medical officer in charge.
St Luke’s had been staffed by lay male doctors from Ireland and Germany since its foundation in 1937. A missionary endeavour, the hospital sought to encourage the formation of catholic families in Nigeria and to spur more widespread conversions to catholicism by providing healthcare to women and children. As the order’s first ‘sister doctor’, Nolan used her extensive gynaecological and obstetric experience, along with her high professional standards, to develop St Luke’s and improve the standard of medical care. In doing so she clashed with her consoeurs and with non-religious medical staff. Nolan, who at times struggled to reconcile her professional standards with her religious vows, also found it difficult to delegate. Many fellow doctors, usually male, chafed under her demanding nature and exacting management; they also likely resented answering professionally to a woman. As medical officer in charge, Nolan dismissed the matron of St Luke’s, her convent superior, as merely in charge of linen and cleaning. She contributed to further unease by seeking advice from Máire Martin, local priests and the diocesan hierarchy, instead of solely relying on the guidance of her local superior. These tensions were as much institutional as personal; Martin later separated the matron and superior functions to prevent a reoccurrence.
Nolan sought to promote the highest standards at St Luke’s (where she became known as ‘the Master’) and to keep abreast of emerging medical and surgical techniques, urging nursing and medical colleagues to keep their training current. The hospital unsuccessfully applied to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology (RCOG) to gain recognition for medical training purposes. However, St Luke’s did gain recognition from the Nigerian General Medical Council for training house doctors, and the British Nursing Council for the senior registered nurse training programme. Nolan also established a branch of the Guild of St Luke, SS Cosmas and Damian (a group of catholic doctors operating internationally) in eastern Nigeria. In January 1949 Nolan was made a fellow of the RCOG. After she made her final profession in Drogheda in September 1949, Nolan, with Martin, attended the Fourth International Congress of Catholic Doctors in Rome. There Nolan gave a paper titled ‘Modern trends in social medicine and their influence on the catholic missions in pagan lands’. Nolan treated a large number of patients during her time in Anua and often undertook surgeries in other, non-catholic hospitals in the region. By 1953 the bed capacity at St Luke’s had been significantly expanded to 200; that year Nolan was replaced in Anua by another sister doctor.
Nolan’s contribution to the health and well-being of the people of Anua was recognised by the local community anointing her ‘Anwa Idiong’ (‘Daughter of the Idiong Cult’). Her service on the Catholic Medical Mission Board, the Eastern Regional Mission Board, and the Eastern Regional Health Board in Nigeria was indicative of her wider contribution to catholic missionary and domestic healthcare. Nolan was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1954 in recognition of her ‘medical and missionary work in Nigeria’. In 1966 the Nigerian government awarded her the prestigious honorific Commander of the Order of the Niger.
A somewhat reluctant advocate and practitioner of symphysiotomy, Nolan acknowledged the procedure’s acceptability to local indigenous Nigerian cultures, which abhorred delivery by caesarean section. Her writing and correspondence demonstrate that her support for the procedure was conditional; Nolan construed the surgery ‘as a means to adapting to local customs and beliefs’ (Veale, 240). Symphysiotomy was referred to by Nolan and others then practising medicine in Nigeria as the ‘Dublin method’, indicating its perceived origins in Irish (catholic) medical education and practice; during the 1950s around half of all medical personnel working in Nigeria had trained in Ireland. Nolan discussed these socio-medical aspects of her work in ‘Some obstetrical problems of tropical Africa’ (1950) and ‘Obstetrical problems in Nigeria’ (1954), published in the Irish Journal of Medical Science.
In a high-profile case that made front-page news, in March 1953 Nolan won an appeal to the Irish supreme court that confirmed her inheritance of a farm in Co. Kildare, bequeathed to her by her father, Edward (the property had been resumed by the Land Commission in 1950, which ascribed a value of £10,000). Edward’s will provided that if Margaret were to die before the age of twenty-one, or before marrying, the farm would instead be sold and the proceeds shared between his relations. Nolan’s entry to the MMM in 1939 precluded the possibility of marriage, and ensuing legal proceedings contributed to the delayed resolution of the issue after her mother Maria’s death in 1943. The judgement made front page news in Ireland and both parties (Nolan’s inheritance was contested by her paternal relatives) were allowed their costs.
Nolan was central in promoting the MMM’s work and achievements. She appeared in the documentary Visitation: the story of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, which premiered in London in 1948. It chronicled the order’s activities in Nigeria and was shown in community and parochial settings wherever the order sought to fundraise; it was particularly popular in the USA. She also compiled Medical Missionaries of Mary: covering the first twenty-five years (1962), a key source for tracing the order’s development. Through the 1960s she was an occasional contributor to the order’s magazine, Medical Missionaries of Mary. Nolan engaged fully with spirit of Gaudium et spes, a key document emerging from the second Vatican council (Vatican II, 1962–5) that sought to propel the church, and especially catholic religious and missionary personnel, to meaningfully engage with the wider world. She debated the novel strands of liberation theology and encouraged the progressive teaching of the catechism to children, likely indicative of her international experience of lived catholicism as both as a lay and religious believer.
In 1960 Nolan embarked on a fundraising and lecture tour across the USA, also attending various medical colloquia. She then spent a year in Tanganyika (later Tanzania), by which time her eyesight was diminishing, as were the fine motor skills on which her surgical acumen relied. From 1961–4 Nolan was executive secretary of the medical department of the Catholic Welfare Conference in Lagos, Nigeria, which oversaw a range of medical and social services across the country delivered by a variety of catholic religious and diocesan organisations. From 1965–7 Nolan managed a remote field hospital at Ikot Ene, a small village south-east of Calabar on the Cross River delta, near the Cameroon border. A proponent of community-based healthcare, between 1967 and 1973 Nolan organised health programmes in Minna in northern Nigeria. After breaking her leg in a traffic accident there, she became reliant on a walking stick. In the early 1970s she inspected clinics the MMM order had established in the remote Turkana desert in Kenya, before returning to Minna. After a brief spell in Drogheda in 1973, Nolan volunteered at St Mary’s Hospital, Eleta, Ibadan, Nigeria. Ill health led her to return once more to Drogheda, where she remained until her death.
Known for brewing her own freshly ground coffee and wearing slacks long before they become commonplace, Nolan was drawn to Dom Columba Marmion’s writings, which she preferred to read in French. She continued to play the piano into later life. Her impressive educational and professional attainments and wealthy family circumstances (which allowed for more than a decade of postgraduate study) certainly contributed to her independence of mind, while her medical experience and acumen contributed significantly to the MMM’s early development and overseas expansion. Diminutive in stature, she was widely respected both within and beyond the order. She died on 16 February 1984 at Our Lady of Lourdes Convent in Drogheda and was buried in St Peter’s cemetery, Drogheda.