User:Margaret Ghilchik/sandbox

Margaret Ghilchik became a source of encouragement to generations of younger women by becoming a busy consultant general surgeon and mother of a family. She worked continuously and full-time, operating until each of her four children were born and then taking her six weeks annual holiday.

Born in Hong Kong, and speaking Cantonese before she spoke English, she was the middle daughter of a South China missionary, a Methodist minister. The hospitals and schools in Fo-shan and Suichow still stand, along with the vast diaspora of medical and educational efforts that accompanied a century and a half of international missionary effort to the sub-continent of China that had brought literacy, medicine and education alongside the Bible. Her father elected to remain in China during World War II and was interned by the Japanese, but she and her sisters and mother were evacuated by the Red Cross to Australia.

She was educated in Melbourne at the Methodist Ladies' College where the wife of the Headmaster, Dr Olive Wood, was an inspiration as a medical doctor. mother of six, and a generous and warm-hearted woman of great Irish charm.

After the War, on returning to England, she went to Rookery Road Elementary School in Handsworth, Birmingham, King Edward VI th High School and the North London Collegiate School. She trained at Barts, St Bartholomew's Hospital and after the BSc year she spent a halcyon year at the Johns Hopkins University, USA, in biochemistry research. She won the Herbert Paterson Medal in Biochemistry, the William Harvey Prize in Practical Physiology and a University of London Scholarship in Science. She qualified MB BS London in 1961. She was House Surgeon to the Surgical Professorial Unit and the Thoracic Surgery Unit at Barts, and held an Alywen Research Bursary there .She did her surgical training as Resident Surgical Officer, RSO, at Harold Wood Hospital, Essex, for two years under Mr John Talbot and became FRCS, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1967. She was surgical registrar at the Westminster Hospital Academic Unit under Professor Harold Ellis for a year before going in to the Professorial Unit at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, as Senior Lecturer in Surgery. Her consultant appointment was at St Charles' Hospital, London W 10 in 1971, ten years after qualifying and she also was Consultant Surgeon at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, the women-for-women's hospital, the Central Middlesex Hospital and St Mary's, in all of which she was Director of the Breast Services. She was an early advocate of breast conservation surgery, of adjuvant chemotherapy, and of breast reconstructive surgery. Together with Dr Len Price and Dr Bridget Hill, the cancer cell biologist, she ran a conference on Safer cancer Chemotherapy at the Royal College of Surgeons which was published as a book, Safer Cancer Chemotherapy. She was Penrose May Tutor at the College running the FRCS course. Together with Professor Mike Reed and Dr Alan Purohit they made signal advances in research of the biology of breast cancer. She married Tony Ghilchik, a chartered accountant and together they had four children, showing a generation of medical students and colleagues that one could be a successful practising consultant surgeon and a mother of four. She put out more than a hundred research publications, in the transplant field and vascular and general surgery as well as breast cancer. She wrote a seminal book gathering the Lives of the first two hundred women doctors who became FRCS England, the first in 1911, Eleanor Davies-Colley and the next in 1919, the mother of Oliver Sacks. She continued to work after St Mary's retired her, taking appointments in Breast and General Surgery all over the country, continuing to share the benefit of long years of experience well into her eighties. .