Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mary Taylor Burnell

Geoffrey Kaye Museum of Anaesthetic History, VGKM6939

Mary Taylor Burnell (1907–1996), anaesthetist, was born on 21 February 1907 at Norwood, Adelaide, elder daughter of South Australian-born parents Charles Angel, accountant, and his wife Mary Jane, née McMillan. Mary attended St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School, where she played hockey and undertook Royal Drawing Society examinations. For her final year in 1923 she was head prefect and she won the Leaving Honours form prize. The following year she enrolled at the University of Adelaide (MB, BS, 1931) to study arts, but changed to science in 1925 and medicine in 1927. She was one of two female medical students in her year and finished third of seven students in her final examinations. Secretary of the university women’s amateur swimming club, she was also a member of the students’ dramatic society.

From 1932 to 1933 Angel was a resident medical officer at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital. Although she had initially wished to be a paediatrician, in January 1934 she became an honorary assistant anaesthetist at the hospital. In November she was also appointed an honorary anaesthetist at the (Royal) Adelaide Hospital. During her studies she had met Glen Howard ‘Jimmy’ Burnell (d. 1954), a widowed surgeon and one of her tutors. They married on 2 June 1934 at the Church of the Epiphany, Crafers.

When Burnell’s first child was born in 1936, she resigned her hospital positions but continued in practice privately as an anaesthetist for her husband. She resumed her public practice at the Children’s Hospital in 1942 and the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 1944. During World War II, she was on call both day and night as the sole anaesthetist at the Children’s Hospital, while also caring for her own three children. Becoming an expert in anaesthetic techniques for children, she delivered some of the earliest papers on the topic given in Australia and developed the field of paediatric anaesthesia in South Australia. Through her influence a department of anaesthesia was created at the Children’s Hospital in 1959.

A member of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists (1935; life member 1969), Burnell became State representative (1949) and then the society’s first female federal president (1953–54). She worked to gain recognition of anaesthetics as a speciality and initiated the society’s overseas visitor program. Elected to the board of the faculty of anaesthetists in the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) in 1955, she became its first female dean in 1966 and an honorary fellow in 1973. She was also an active member of the South Australian Medical Women’s Society, serving as president from 1953 to 1954.

Burnell retired from public practice in 1968 and from private practice the following year. She was elected a fellow (1968) of the English Faculty of Anaesthesia and an honorary fellow (1976) of the RACS, and received Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee medal in 1977. In 1975 the University of Adelaide created the Burnell-Jose visiting professorship in anaesthesia in honour of Burnell and the surgeon Ivan Jose.

With ‘a radical mind’ hidden ‘beneath a conventionally elegant exterior,’ Burnell had a ‘sense of hospitality’ and a ‘connoisseur’s taste’ that ‘made her dinner party invitations much sought-after’ (Murray 1997, 47). Among her interests outside anaesthesia were wine tasting (she was made a chevalier in the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin) and the history of art; in her retirement she attended art classes and played bridge. After suffering a severe cerebral haemorrhage, she passed her last five years in a nursing home. Survived by her sons Richard and Tony and her daughter Anne, she died on 25 August 1996 at Walkerville, and was cremated. In an obituary, Burnell’s friend and fellow anaesthetist Gwen Wilson observed that ‘Australian anaesthetic organisations are unique in the world in their acceptance of women anaesthetists as equal colleagues, and this is due in large part to the work, status and influence of Mary Taylor Burnell’; she described Burnell as ‘one of the most distinguished contributors to her field in this country’ (Wilson 1996, 10). The Mothers’ and Babies’ Health Association, to which Burnell had belonged for thirty years, named a building after her.