Alice Bush - Medical Career

Medical Career

Born in 1914, Alice Stanton entered the Otago Medical School at the University of Otago, Dunedin, in 1933, and completed her MB and ChB in 1937. In 1938, she was appointed a Resident at the Auckland Hospital, and became visiting doctor at Auckland's Truby King Karitane Hospital and Mothercraft Care facility in the same year.

In the forties, Alice also became involved in medical politics. She co-authored a document that recommended A National Health Service (1943) for New Zealand, after she married William Bush in 1940. Alice also served as Secretary (1945-6) and President (1948, 1953) of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Medical Women's Association. She joined the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (1946) and later became a fellow of the same organisation- the first women to do so (1955). In 1947, she spent some time in London, where she served as a doctor at the Hospital For Sick Children in that city, before returning to New Zealand with her husband, where she helped to establish the Pediatric Society of New Zealand in that same year.