Lucy Meredith Bryce
(1897-1968)
The occasional panics over the safety of supplies in the Blood Banks
of Australia may serve to remind us how much we owe to the work of the
haematologist Lucy Bryce.
Graduating in Medicine from Melbourne University in 1922, Bryce held
research posts at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
from 1922 to 1928, enriched by a year in London at the Lister Institute.
Following a period as a bacteriologist and clinical pathologist at the
Royal Melbourne Hospital, Bryce entered private practice while continuing
part-time research at the Hall Institute and Commonwealth Serum Laboratories.
Bryce is, however, best remembered as the honorary director of the Victorian
Blood Transfusion Service, organising a panel of donors who would attend
hospitals when donations were required. Her responsibilities included
blood grouping, laboratory testing and medical care of the donors. She
supervised the implementation of new procedures pioneered during the
Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. During the Second World War Bryce was
visiting specialist at the 115th Australian General Hospital at Heidelberg,
Victoria.
She was the author of numerous scientific articles and a history of
the Blood Bank up to 1959, published under the title of An Abiding Gladness.
At the time of her death, she was working on a book about her travels
in south-east Europe in the 1920s. Her entry in the Australian Dictionary
of Biography notes that her “soft voice and manner
of a cultured gentlewoman concealed a surprising firmness of purpose.
She made large demands on those who worked for her but had the capacity
to inspire great loyalty from them. William Dargie's portrait of her
hangs in the Lucy Bryce Hall at the Central Blood Bank.
