Lady Cilento hospital drama: Who was Lady Cilento

SHE was described by former premier Campbell Newman as the leading female clinician of the past 100 years, but the woman for whom Brisbane’s Lady Cilento Hospital was named had many more strings to her bow.

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IT’S hard to believe how much one person can cram into their life, especially a mother of six, but there’s no denying Lady Phyllis Cilento achieved a lot.

A mother, a doctor, a journalist and a champion for natural childbirth and family planning are among her many achievements.

Born at Rockdale in Sydney in 1894, Lady Cilento would go on to study medicine at the University of Adelaide and work as a house surgeon at Adelaide Hospital before travelling to London to reunite with her father after WWI.

Lady Phyllis and Sir Raphael Cilento in Brisbane in 1949. Picture: State Library of Queensland.

It was there that she became interested in nutrition as a clinical clerk at the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street. It was just one of many countries where she either worked or studied during her career.

Lady Cilento, and her husband Raphael, who she met when they both studied at the University of Adelaide, undertook advanced training abroad in Britain, the USA and New Zealand.

In 1921 she had the first of her six children and in 1922 she took a course in public health at the University of Sydney.

It wasn’t until 1928 that she settled in Brisbane and worked as a physician at the Hospital for Sick Children for seven years.

Then for the best part of the following 36 years she was a GP and obstetrician.

Her surgery was attached to her Annerley home to allow her to supervise her children, the second of which, Academy Award-nominated actor Dianne, would go onto marry ‘James Bond’ actor Sean Connery in 1963.

Lady Cilento studied medicine at the University of Adelaide.

While practising from her home, she also lectured in mothercraft at the University of Queensland.

She eventually sold her Annerley practice in 1964 and moved to Toowong in 1967 where she continued to work as a doctor until the early 1980s.

Her career as a journalist started in 1928.

She contributed articles on mothercraft for Woman’s Budget and under the norm de plume Mother M.D. for Brisbane’s Daily Mail and then for The Courier-Mail from 1933. She also wrote for Woman’s Day.

She would go on to write for Queensland newspapers and was the inaugural president of the Queensland Medical Women’s Society.

Her topics included nutrition, children and mother’s health and wide range of child care subjects.

She also leant herself to a number of organisations. She was the inaugural president of Queensland Medical Women’s Society (1929), a founding the Mothercraft Association of Queensland (1931) and a member of the inaugural council of the Family Planning Association of Queensland.

Her list of awards includes being the first Queensland Mother of the Year, Queenslander of the Year in 1987 and made a life member of the Australian Medical Association.

She wrote more than 20 books including Square Meals for the Family (1933), Plan Your Family: Practical Birth Control (1965) and All About The Pill (1971).