Helen Mary Mayo

Helen Mary Mayo was born on 1 October 1878 in Adelaide, eldest of seven children of George Gibbes Mayo, draughtsman and later civil engineer, and his wife Henrietta Mary, née Donaldson. Educated by a tutor at home—her studies included physics—and for two years at the Advanced School for Girls, she matriculated in 1895 and entered the University of Adelaide next year. Helen enrolled in arts because her father considered her too young to study medicine. She began medical studies in 1898, winning the Davies Thomas scholarship in 1901 and the Everard scholarship in 1902; she was the university's second woman graduate in medicine (1902). After a year as house surgeon at the (Royal) Adelaide Hospital, she left for London where she was a clinical clerk at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. Following a course in tropical medicine, she gained experience in midwifery in Dublin and at St Stephen's Hospital for women and children in Delhi.

Returning to Adelaide in 1906 Mayo entered private practice, combining midwifery and the management of the medical problems of women and children; she was honorary anaesthetist at the Adelaide Children's Hospital. In 1911 she became clinical bacteriologist at the Adelaide Hospital and later established its vaccine department. She gathered material there for her thesis on biological therapy by the administration of vaccines, proceeding in 1926 to the first M.D. degree awarded to a woman by the university.

During World War I Mayo had been demonstrator in pathology at the university and in 1926-34 she was clinical lecturer in medical diseases of children. From 1919 she was physician to out-patients at the Children's Hospital and, from 1926, physician to in-patients. On retiring in 1938 she became honorary consulting physician, but in 1940 returned to the hospital as senior paediatric adviser for the duration of World War II, simultaneously organising the Red Cross donor transfusion service and instructing in infant feeding.

In 1935 her 'zeal for efficiency' was rewarded by appointment as O.B.E.

In 1914 Mayo had become the first woman university councillor in Australia; she continued to serve on the University of Adelaide's council until 1960. 

She died on 13 November 1967 and was cremated. Her portrait by William Dargie hangs at St Ann's; and rooms there, and at the university, and an annual M.B.H.A. lecture are named for her.