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Victoria Coffey was known for her diligent and hard-working manner. She carried these skills throughout her entire education and career which led her to have such a powerful impact on Irish Medical Research. In 1936, at the age of 25, Victoria Coffey qualified for the Royal College of Surgeons which is located on 123 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, D02 YN77. She qualified with a licentiate degree and degree in midwifery of the conjoint board of the Royal Colleges. Seven years later, in 1943, she took a DPH diploma in Children’s Health in the RCSI.

She developed her strong qualities of leadership, responsibility and pugnacious personality as a result of working with empowering men such as Tom Lane, Henry Stokes and Oliver St John Gogarty in the Meath Hospital. , the cradle of the Dublin School of Medicine, where she both was a student and house officer. In the same year she served as a clinical clerk at the Coombe Hospital for women. Shortly after this she was appointed as a medical officer in St Kevin’s hospital due to having a vast knowledge in obstetrics which is the branch of medicine and surgery concerned with childbirth and midwifery. This is where she discovered her interest in the neglected field of congenital birth defects and began a distinguished publishing career. She was extremely motivated to learn about the health of new-borns and young children and focused on this unglamorous and understudied area of paediatrics.



Victoria wrote her first paper in 1953 on the topic of syphilis in children born to unmarried mothers (the incidence was about 1 percent). Her pioneering research mainly focused around children born with congenital and metabolic diseases this was all with the help of the Medical Research Council, Professor Jessop of the Meath Hospital and Trinity College Dublin. She then began to research the topic of sudden infant death syndrome and was one of the first females to look into this subject. Sudden infant death syndrome is the unexplained death of seemingly healthy babies of less than one year old. It is also called crib death syndrome as it usually happens when the child is asleep. Her numerous publications covered virtually all aspects of congenital disorders. In 1954 Victoria gave a paper at the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland on this topic.

She published her findings in the Irish Journal of Medical Science between 1955 and 1959. In recognition of her work in the area, she was appointed lecturer in teratology at TCD in 1961, gaining a Ph.D. from the university in 1965 for a thesis on the Incidence and Aetiology of Congenital Defects in Ireland. She published internationally and maintained her research output for several years after her retirement. This academic abundance had a huge impact on Irish Medical Research.

 References 

 External Links 

What is an Obstetrician: https://www.webmd.com/baby/what-is-an-obstetrician-twins#1

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sudden-infant-death-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20352800