The death of Dr Sheenah Jean McKinnon Russell took place just three weeks short of her 87th birthday in Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, where she had given outstanding and distinguished service as the first full time consultant paediatrician—a rare achievement for a woman at the time—and where she was the doyenne of the medical scene.
Sheenah, the only child of George and Jean Russell, both teachers, spent her youth in Glasgow. She attended the High School for Girls. A distinguished pupil, her reports placed her first in her class each year and dux of the school.
At Glasgow University she studied medicine and graduated MB ChB in 1943. She was awarded the class medal in clinical medicine, and she received a first class certificate. She took up resident posts in midwifery at Lennox Castle; in medicine at Stobhill, where Professor Noah Morris proved to be a wonderful teacher; and surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Wartime conditions hampered progress because the medical boards of the local war office failed to give leave for her to proceed to a resident’s position at the Sick Children’s Hospital. Nevertheless, she pursued her special interest by serving unofficially in the Sick Children’s Hospital and doing jobs for the professor, who in time achieved clinical assistant status for her there, a situation which merited some small remuneration. A Muirhead Scholarship of £50 per annum and an All Fellows Scholarship of £100 followed and put her on a less precarious financial footing. She gained an MD (commend) and a DCH in 1947. Better salaries followed the advent of the NHS in July 1948.
Things were difficult in the profession for women in the post-war era. Men returning from the services were given priority. She “had to vacate” the post of senior registrar at the Sick Children’s Hospital in 1952. Thinking that she “might fare better” in public health, she took a DPH in 1953. Experience working in infectious diseases being obligatory, she accepted a lesser post at Ruchill Hospital as a resident. However, Professor Morris interceded: she became honorary senior registrar with a scholarship and an improved salary.
Long cherished hopes of a post with children were fulfilled when in 1954 she moved to Dumfries to serve in Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary. The appointment was at the level of senior hospital medical officer with the specific designation of assistant paediatrician for Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire under Dr Abramson, a situation with minimal supervision and which required each of them to cover for the other’s holidays. It was the early 1960s before the first registrar was appointed to the paediatric service in Dumfries. Management in Dumfries began to insist that she serve there full time, and about the same time her fellow officers began to press for consultant status, which was achieved for her in 1963.
The paediatric service in Dumfries in the 1950s involved working on three sites half a mile to a mile distant from each other: her base was a cramped 26-bed unit in the Nithbank Infirmary, which had had to have plans shelved for its replacement in the 1930s because of the war. Cresswell Maternity Hospital, set up in 1939 in the former poorhouse, was quite inadequate. Equipment, such as incubators, was primitive, and in both situations there was an inherent risk of cross infection, especially in Cresswell, where the babies were wheeled to their mothers, head to toe on the “sausage trolley.” It is clear that the job must have been onerous and stressful when one adds in coverage of beds in Parkhead Infectious Diseases Hospital. Night time calls were very much in the line of duty.
Sheenah had become a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh by examination in 1952—no mean feat in those days. In a later autobiographical article she wrote: “I must put on record my unbounded joy at being elected to the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. This honour was awarded in 1971. My self esteem has demanded that I should claim that it was due to recognition of work being skilfully carried out. (Readers will please forgive a statement, which sounds like conceit.)”
Sheenah, who had been involved in meetings to discuss replacement hospitals, revelled in the spacious, attractive, new settings at Cresswell, completed in 1968, and Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary in 1975. She had the honour of being presented to the Queen, who performed the official opening, and of conducting Her Majesty round the department.
The new set-up permitted the development of sleeping over by a parent, expansion of the role of ward schoolteachers, more emphasis on play, a relaxed atmosphere, and less restricted visiting. In 1979, the Year of the Child, and two years later, the Year of the Disabled, she felt that summer picnics would be beneficial; regular attenders were invited back to join in the fun. Catering staff rose to the occasion and dressed up as butler and footmen.
Dr Russell is particularly remembered with gratitude by parents in the region for her sterling work in saving many a child on the brink of death and for her successes in childhood leukaemia.
Dr Russell retired at the end of October 1984. Thirty years of dedicated service to child health, which she carried out with exemplary wisdom, skill, compassion, and humanity towards the children of Dumfries and Galloway, earned her respect and gratitude as a pioneer in transforming hospital life for young people, in restoring them to a brighter future, and, not least, in spending long hours vigil by a cot or bedside.
Her colleague, now consultant paediatrician, Dr Ruth Thomson said: “I believe she arranged for the first incubator at Cresswell to be constructed by the hospital works department. She set up outreach clinics across the region so that families with young children would not have to travel to Dumfries to clinics. She was on duty continuously without a day off or night off for almost five months before I arrived in December 1980.”
As a lifetime devotee of music in general and of opera in particular, she enjoyed having more time in retirement to follow such interests. Regular holidays in Largs and on Arran were a source of great pleasure. She took a keen interest in flowers, both wild and cultivated. Her last years were marred by failing eyesight and ultimate blindness, which she bore with characteristic fortitude. Altruism was the guiding principle of her life to the end. She concluded the above autobiographical article with the words: “Dumfries and Galloway and Ayrshire, I thank you for the pleasures you have given to my life in your midst.”
Glasgow University Archives Services produced a signed photograph from the “End of Year Dinner Book” for 1943, which describes Sheenah Russell in a quotation from Ben Johnson: “Learned and fair and good as she.”
Former consultant paediatrician Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary (b Springburn, Glasgow, 18 December 1920; q Glasgow 1943; MD, DCH, DPH, FRCP), died in Dumfries, aged 87, on 27 November 2007.