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Janet Welch

Janet Welch, MBE (March 2nd, 1894 - November 24th 1959), also known as Janet Welch Mackie, was an English doctor who worked mainly in East Africa and the USA. Her work, research and published material helped in establishing modern healthcare and nursing practices in the developing world. From 1926 until 1938 she worked as a Medical Missionary with the Church of Scotland, working mostly in Blantyre in modern day Malawi. In 1942 she emigrated to the USA, where she married New York based doctor, Thomas Turlay Mackie. Following her marriage she was generally referred to as Janet Welch Mackie or Janet W Mackie. In 1946 she became an Assistant Professor at the Bowman Gray Medical School in North Carolina alongside her husband and eventually went on to become a Medical Consultant to the US Public Health Service and World Health Organisation.

Early Life

Janet was born in March 1894 in the village of North Rauceby, close to Sleaford in Lincolnshire England. She was the second daughter of William and Alice, her older sister, Alice Norwood Welch was born in 1891. William Welch was a farmer, as indeed his father and grandfather had been. Janet’s mother also came from a farming family near Southwell in Nottinghamshire.

Janet attended Sleaford High School until 1908 when her family moved to take over the Hall Farm in Thoroton, Nottinghamshire. Once resident at Thoroton Hall, she transferred to Nottingham Girls High School. In her final year at the school she was Head Girl. Janet chronicled her final 2 years at school (1913 and early 1914) in a series of ink sketches, noting events both in and out of school.

In what can only be seen as a curious coincidence, 30 years before The Welch family moved in, Thoroton Hall had been home to the young Ethel Gordon Bedford Fenwick, who was one of the founders of the Nursing profession in England and is in the records as the First State Registered Nurse in England.

First World War

Janet left school on July 28th 1914, the very day that the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared War on Serbia, setting in motion the series of diplomatic exchanges that led to the outbreak of the First World War.

In the summer of 1915, Janet joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment. As a VAD, Janet worked as an assistant to professional nurses, first of all at St Dunstan’s Hostel for Blinded Soldiers and Sailors at Regent’s Park in London and later at the 3rd General London Hospital in Wandsworth. She kept diaries of her time in both hospitals, although only a few fragmentary pages of the diary from Wandsworth have survived. In her diaries, she comments on many of the aspects of life, the people she met and what was going on around her, rather than writing specifically about her work. Janet's diaries from both this period and her schooldays and this wartime period were published in full in 2019

Medical Career

Africa

In October 1919, Janet enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women. She graduated MB,BS in 1926, The School of Medicine had by then become part of the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Janet entered the Church of Scotland Missionary Service on September 16th 1926 and by November of that year she was registered as a Medical Practitioner in Nairobi, Kenya in East Africa. By 1928 Janet had moved south to Nyasaland (modern day Malawi), where she joined the staff of the Church of Scotland Hospital in Blantyre. This town had in fact been founded by the Church of Scotland in 1876 and is named for the Scottish birthplace of one the Church of Scotland’s most famous missionaries in Africa, Dr. David Livingstone.

During her time in Africa, Janet established a strong reputation for herself. She was described by various commentators as enthusiastic, energetic and of having a passion and gift for Welfare work. In particular she worked with local women to educate them in nursing and midwifery practice. In July 1930, she returned to London for post graduate studies at the London School of Tropical Medicine, graduating with the 2nd highest mark in her class in the spring of 1931 before returning to her post in Blantyre. The student with the joint highest grade in her class was one, Thomas Turlay Mackie.

In the UK New Year Honours for 1936 she was awarded an MBE for ‘services in connection with maternal and child welfare in the Nyasaland Protectorate’ and during that year she became the President of the Nyasaland Branch of the British Medical Association.

In October 1938, Janet sailed back to England, left the missionary service and embarked on the next stage of her career. In 1939 she was the recipient of a grant from the New York based Carnegie Foundation to study and report on developments in nursing. There is some evidence that she was already involved with the Foundation earlier than 1939, although just what and how deep the connection was remains to be discovered.

In October 1939 Janet left Liverpool by sea for New York.

America

Janet worked in New York for several months, living at the address of her future husband Thomas Turlay Mackie on Park Avenue before sailing in June 1940 to Puerto Rico. Her destination in Puerto Rico was the School of Tropical Medicine in San Juan. By that time, Thomas Mackie was Director of the American Foundation for Tropical Medicine with a base at that School.

In 1941 Janet published a booklet, Nursing Education related to the Cultural Background in East and Southeast African Colonies.

Janet returned to England briefly during late 1941, leaving again on February 20th 1942 on board the SS Aircrest in an Atlantic convoy. She entered the USA on March 2nd and married Thomas Mackie on March 14th. Mackie himself had only completed the divorce from his first wife Carolyn Bleecker van Cortlandt in June 1941.

As the Second World War intensified, Janet’s husband was called into service. He served as a Doctor with the rank of Colonel, in the US Army in South East Asia. Janet in the meantime continued to work in the USA, publishing further booklets, including, Notes on the Techniques of Elementary Public Health Education in 1943 and contributing to publications such as The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene: Adaptation of Public Health Practice to Foreign Cultures in 1944 and the American Journal of Nursing: Nursing in Other American Republics, 1945. She travelled widely in Latin America during that time working for the US Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs. There is at least one reference to her also working with Walt Disney on the series of public health and safety films that the studio produced during that time.

Reunited following the end of the war Janet and Thomas were offered the opportunity to head up a new department at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston Salem, North Carolina. She took up the post of Assistant professor of Preventive Medicine in the spring of 1946. Almost from the outset, Thomas Mackie had a somewhat fractious relationship with the school management. By early 1948, Mackie was championing the idea that the school join with him in establishing a School of Tropical Medicine in the Dominican Republic. This proposal actually came to fruition in early 1949 after which point Mackie’s direct involvement with his original position at the school and, seemingly his marriage to Janet became increasingly tenuous. Mackie resigned his post at Bowman Gray in June 1951, divorced from Janet six months later, quickly remarried and moved to Westport, Connecticut. Janet, became a US citizen in 1948. She remained in her post at Bowman Gray for a while after her husband’s departure, but in 1952, she left the school and became a Medical Consultant to the US Public Health Service. Continuing to live in Winston Salem, Janet worked out of Washington DC, but with her knowledge and history she found herself quite literally working around the world, with developing communities both within and outside the USA. She is recorded as having been a US Public Health Service adviser in Thailand (1954) as well as with native American communities in Southwest USA, Alaska and Hawaii.

By 1953, she was also a consultant to a World Health Organisation Expert committee in Geneva.

Janet retired from the US Public Health Service in 1958, at the age of 64. She continued to work with the W.H.O. however, contributing to several publications and reports.

She also contributed a major section to the National Academy of Sciences publication ‘Tropical Health’ which was published posthumously in 1962.

Personal Life

Little is recorded of Janet’s personal life other than the bare facts of her marriage. Her diaries from her late teens and early twenties do not mention any boyfriends or relationships, although she was clearly interested in men, as evidenced by various asides in her writing, at one point in 1915 for example, she describes Edwin Baker, a Canadian patient at St. Dunstan’s as being ‘quite a babe’.

She met her future husband Thomas Mackie at the London School of Medicine in 1930/31 when both were carrying out post graduate studies there. As to when their relationship became more intimate, that is not so clear, although she was living with Mackie by the summer of 1940, at least a year before Mackie divorced from his first wife. Their marriage did not last however. Following their divorce in December 1951, Mackie remarried just 15 days later.

Death

Janet Welch died on November 24, 1959. She was waiting to board a train at the Union Station in Washington DC, heading home to Winston-Salem when she suffered a fatal heart attack. She was buried at the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington DC.