By Anna Krohn
One-hundred years ago, on 27 January 1920, a ship called the SS Orsova docked in the Port of Fremantle in preparation for its long voyage to London via the port of Colombo on the South West Coast of today’s Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon).
We know from her subsequent letter writing, how much Mary relished, the sights and sounds of Fremantle and Perth. From the ship, she was warmly greeted by relatives, including her paternal uncle John Glowrey and his family. John became a Western Australian MLC and was the successful publican of the Palace Hotel on St George’s Tce.
Mary was enthusiastic and humorous about her short visit to Perth: “There is nothing in Melbourne to compare with Kings Park and the Swan River… The river is so wide and beautiful it is more like a harbour to eyes accustomed to the Yarra”.
In a real sense Mary was leaving Australia and her beloved Victorian family forever. However, she carried this love with her in a heightened sense of her role as an agent of the healing love of Christ in India. Mary was quietly excited and confident that she was setting out to fulfil “God’s Holy Will”, but much of the precise shape of the vocation still lay ahead of her that day, carried in hope as she stepped onto the sandy shore of Fremantle.
At Easter in 2013, Dr Mary was declared Servant of God, the second Australian-born person (at that stage) to begin the path to official canonisation.
Now, in our own Coronavirus-strapped times, Mary shines as an important intercessor and inspiration as we navigate our own mission to offer hope and healing in uncertain and unstable times. Her imperturbable and practical faith and her compassion for people of all faiths and backgrounds was at once so genuinely Australian and yet so strikingly universal in scope.
On her arrival in India in February 1920, Mary became a professed sister in the (originally) Dutch missionary order of Jesus Mary and Joseph and as Dr Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart JMJ, would be the Church’s first religious sister and medical physician.
Dr Mary worked in Guntur and its surrounding Indian regions, as a drastically under-resourced and often sole medical practitioner demonstrating such organisational dexterity and foresight, that she was able to tend to tens-of-thousands of Indian patients, while establishing a hospital, training local people in nursing and pharmaceutical compounding, running mobile clinics and corresponding with local bishops and religious communities and much more besides.
She was ingenious and inventive in her confrontations with drought, famine, plague and with the common shortage of medicine and equipment. She also kept up a lively correspondence with Australia and kept abreast of research and ethical controversy in western medicine and society.
Understanding the importance of ethical, organisational and medical co-operation between Catholic healthcare institutions while India was experiencing the deprivations and dangers of Second World War, Mary founded the Catholic Hospitals’ Association.
“ … a woman of her time, unusually medically qualified and experienced.”
Today her legacy lives on in Catholic Health Association of India (CHAI) which plays an important part in India’s response to the growing coronavirus crisis in that country.
CHAI today currently cares for more than 21 million Indians each year and it comprises 3500 member agencies, 500 hospitals and clinics, five medical colleges, 7600 healthcare workers and 1000 religious sisters who are also qualified doctors.
The association has, in past months, assembled online training programs, devised sanitary protocols, and outreach packages and multi-lingual campaigns to the most disadvantaged people in India.
Dr Mary was, for a woman of her time, unusually medically qualified and experienced, having specialised and practiced in obstetrics, gynaecology and ophthalmology. Whilst in Australia and during her 37 years in India until her death, there is evidence of her original insights into the social and cultural factors which contribute the wellbeing and health of her patients, particularly in women and children.
In a letter to her parents in 1924 from India, she thanked them for their wise and faith-filled formation of her sense of vocation: “God has guided me wonderfully, so now I want to thank you, Mama, for that lesson of long ago, and Dada for expressing God’s Holy Will in the matter of studying medicine. For day by day I see more clearly how in healing the sick one comes in touch with souls, souls more weak and suffering than the bodies”.
To learn more about the Mary Glowrey Museum (which in Australia curates and promotes Dr Mary’s life and legacy), visit www.maryglowreymuseum.info or email info@maryglowreymuseum.info or call (03) 9416 4674.
From pages 20 to 21 of Issue 27: Adult Faith Formation in the context of Healing’ of The Record Magazine