Grief in Ethiopia as trailblazing Australian doctor dies

No-one came to meet Catherine Hamlin the day she arrived at a tiny airport in Ethiopia in 1959.

More than 60 years later, the news of the Australian gynaecologist’s death at the age of 96 was met with an outpouring of grief in the country she had made her home.

That is because of the work Dr Hamlin - along with her late husband, Reginald - did transforming and, in some cases, saving the lives of tens of thousands of women who had been cast out of their communities.

Treating obstetric fistulas - a preventable injury sustained in childbirth that leaves women incontinent and can lead to other infections - would become her life’s work.

"These are the women most to be pitied in the world," Dr Hamlin told the New York Times in 2003.

"They're alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers, or Aids victims, there are organisations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them."

The 'cursed' women living in shame

Elinor Catherine Nicholson was born in Sydney in 1924, one of six children. She decided to train to be a doctor because she wanted to help women and children.

After she completed her training, she began work at Crown Street Women’s Hospital, where she met a doctor from New Zealand, Reginald Hamlin.

They were married in 1950, and had a son, Richard, two years later.
'We never came back'

But the two wanted to go and work in a developing nation, and one day an advert in British medical journal The Lancet caught their eye.

"It just read 'gynaecologist wanted in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa'," Dr Hamlin told the BBC in 2016. It was enough to pique their interest, and the couple applied.

"We felt we would like to do something to help people in the world, because we had had so many advantages," Dr Hamlin explained.

The idea was to stay for a couple of years. "But we never came back."

So they set off from Sydney, sending a cable from the middle of the Indian Ocean to let their new colleagues know of their imminent arrival. It didn’t quite go according to plan.

"The cable didn’t get there until three weeks after we did, so there was nobody to meet us."


But they soon settled in, and it wasn’t long before they began to notice a number of women with a condition they had never seen before: obstetric fistula.

"We were touched and appalled by the sadness of our first fistula patient: a beautiful young woman in urine-soaked ragged clothes, sitting alone in our outpatients department away from the other waiting patients," Dr Hamlin later recalled to the Guardian.

"We knew she was more in need than any of the others."

Two million women live with the condition globally, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Without help, many die. Those who survive - like the woman in the waiting room - are left with injuries that leave them incontinent, sometimes heavily.

In Ethiopia many were left with a deep sense of shame. They found themselves banished to the outskirts of their communities, abandoned by their husbands. The stigma and social isolation led some to end their lives.