Mary Glowrey

Mary Glowrey (1887-1957) was an Australian physician who became a Catholic religious sister and spent 37 years in India building medical services for poor women, and who in 1943 founded the body now known as the Catholic Health Association of India.

Born at Birregurra in Victoria, she qualified in medicine and surgery at the University of Melbourne in 1910 and later took a doctorate in obstetrics, gynaecology and ophthalmology in 1919. She was the first woman doctor at Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand and, during the First World War, carried much of the clinical load at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne while male colleagues were on service, alongside a private practice.

In October 1915 she read a pamphlet about Agnes McLaren, a Scottish missionary doctor, and about the shortage of women doctors in India, where custom prevented many women from being examined by men. She left Melbourne in January 1920, arrived in Guntur the following month and never returned to Australia. Joining the Congregation of Jesus Mary Joseph, she is believed to be the first Catholic religious sister permitted to practise as a doctor. Over the following decades she treated hundreds of thousands of patients, most of them poor women, and, understanding that one doctor could not meet the need, trained Indian women as dispensers, midwives and nurses.

In 1943 she brought the country's Catholic hospitals together as the Catholic Hospitals' Association, later the Catholic Health Association of India, which today has more than 3,500 member institutions between them caring for over 21 million people a year. She died of cancer in Bangalore in 1957.

Glowrey was added to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2015. The Catholic Church declared her a Servant of God in 2013 and, in November 2025, Pope Leo XIV recognised her as having lived a life of heroic virtue, giving her the title Venerable. The St John's Medical College alumni association presents an award in her name for work in healthcare among underserved communities.[2]