Background

Elinor Catherine Hamlin, maiden name Nicholson, was born on January 24, 1924, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She was a daughter of Elinor Nicholson and Theodore Nicholson. She grew up in Ryde, a suburb of Sydney, as one of six children, including two sisters, Sheila and Alisha, and three brothers, Peter, Donald, and John. Hamlin lived on her family's estate, called the Hermitage, during her childhood.

Education

In 1936, when Catherine Hamlin turned twelve, she was sent to an all-girls boarding school called Frensham in Mittagong, Australia. During her time at Frensham, Hamlin later said, she decided to become a doctor. She graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Sydney Sydney, Australia, at the age of twenty-two in 1946. After graduating, Hamlin completed two internships at different hospitals in Sydney. She interned at St. Joseph's Hospital in the suburb of Auburn, and later at the St. George Hospital in the suburb of Kogarah. In 2005, Catherine Hamlin received a Doctor of Medicine Honoris Causa from the University of Sydney. In 2006, she received a Doctorate of Law Honoris Causa from Dundee University. In 2010, Hamlin received an honorary degree from the University of Addis Ababa.

Career

After internships, Catherine Hamlin applied for a resident's position at the Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sidney. After her interview with the medical superintendent, Reginald Henry James Hamlin, Hamlin chose a career in women's medicine and specialized in obstetrics. She became a senior resident medical officer at the Crown Street Women's Hospital. Hamlin worked in the labor ward at the Crown Street Women's Hospital, where she learned to treat abnormal obstetric conditions. She continued to work at Crown Street Women's Hospital until 1952.

In 1952, the Hamlins moved to London, where her husband Reginald Hamlin was offered a position at the Samaritan Hospital for Women. In 1956, the Hamlin family returned to Australia when Reginald Hamlin tried to become a consultant at the Crown Street Women's Hospital. However, due to a professional dispute with fellow obstetrician Thomas Dixon-Hughes, Reginald Hamlin was ultimately denied the position. In the interim, Elinor Hamlin accepted an obstetrics position at The Adelaide Children's Hospital in Adelaide, Australia. During that time, she found an advertisement in the Lancet soliciting humanitarian work for physicians in Ethiopia, to which she and her husband applied.

When Hamlin and her husband were offered positions in Ethiopia, she later reported feeling like she was answering the call to help people in underdeveloped countries. Hamlin writes in her memoir that during her fifth year at the University of Sydney she wanted to become a missionary, and nearly ten years later she had finally achieved that goal. The Hamlin family relocated to Ethiopia in 1959. Hamlin and her husband worked at the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A board of trustees in the United Kingdom managed the hospital and hired the Hamlins. Catherine Hamlin and her husband worked as gynecologists and established a midwifery school that would function out of the hospital.

The Hamlins initially contracted with the Ethiopian Government to work at the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for three years. They were contracted to help with the maternal ward, but many of the cases they received were obstetric fistulas that arose primarily among rural women. Though Hamlin had dealt with obstetric abnormalities as a result of her work in Australia, she had never treated obstetric fistulas. Hamlin and her husband talked with friends and experts on the subject of treating and preventing fistulas. As obstetric fistulas were not common in Australia, the Hamlins had no experience with the surgery required to repair fistulas.

Catherine Hamlin credited the 1928 work of Heinrich Martius in Germany, and his procedure called the Martius fat pad graft, with helping to increase the success rate of the fistula operations that she and her husband performed at the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital. The high success rates of the fistula operations performed by Hamlin and her husband attracted attention from other specialists on obstetric fistulas. John Chassar Moir, an obstetrician, and gynecologist from the United Kingdom, who had published about vesicovaginal fistulas, visited the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital and received training from the Hamlins on how to treat difficult cases of obstetric fistulas. According to Hamlin, Moir was taken aback by the level of injury sustained by some of the women, and he considered many of those extreme cases to be inoperable.

The Hamlins struggled to treat fistula patients at The Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital because the government could not fund the operations, and patients were often too poor to pay their admission fees. Catherine Hamlin and her husband often paid the admission fee for those patients from their own salaries. When Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, was deposed in 1974, The Princes Tsehai Memorial Hospital was relocated and turned into a military hospital.

The Hamlins founded the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The hospital only treated women with fistulas. They built the facility after receiving a donation of 10,000 pounds from a donor in New Zealand. On 24 May 1975, Hamlin and her husband opened the newly built hospital and christened it the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. After founding the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, they dedicated their time as surgeons to helping women with fistulas. After the death of her husband in 1993, Catherine Hamlin continued her work at the hospital.

By 2015, The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital had treated more than 30,000 fistula patients. Operations were funded through Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia, a charitable organization that raised funds for the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, for the Hamlin College of Midwives, established in 2007, and for Desta Mender, established in 2010. The Hamlin College of Midwives trained midwives, who then worked in rural communities. Desta Menda became a rehabilitation center where long-term obstetric fistula patients lived and worked. Hamlin continued to live in Ethiopia as the chair of the board of trustees of Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia and as a senior consultant in surgery at Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital also functioned as a training center for visiting doctors from Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Students completing postgraduate work in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Addis Ababa University often received further training at the hospital.

In her book, The Hospital by the River: A Story of Hope, published in 2001, Catherine Hamlin and co-author John Little recount the Hamlins' extraordinary lives. Shortly after arriving in Ethiopia, the Hamlins' were changed forever when they encountered their first fistula patient, a seventeen-year-old woman who had undergone labor for five days. As a result, the woman suffered from a condition called obstetrical, or vaginal, fistula. The problem is typified by abnormal openings between the bladder and/or the vagina and rectum, which usually includes severe internal injuries and leads to various degrees of pain and incontinence. Soon, the couple would learn that this condition, which had become relatively rare and was routinely treated in most developed countries, occurred often in young Ethiopian women and that it often went untreated. The couple was also deeply troubled by the fact that the young Ethiopian women who suffered from this problem were routinely treated as outcasts who lived the remainder of their lives incapacitated and in shame. The problem, as Hamlin recounts in her book, stems from a centuries-old practice in which young girls, many under the age of ten, are sold into marriage to adult males. Their small, still immature bodies are often not capable of giving birth without suffering fistulas, which often cripples them from nerve damage that occurs during a labor process that can sometimes last for days. As a result, the child they carry is usually born dead. Their bladders burst and, in extreme cases, their bowels also drip almost continuously. The ultimate emotional insult comes when these women are then abandoned by their husbands and ostracized by the rest of the community.

Achievements

• Catherine Hamlin and her husband Reginald Hamlin pioneered the surgical treatment of obstetric fistula. Hamlins developed surgical techniques, began to operate on their patients, and eventually achieved a 93% success rate. Their dedication and vision have allowed 60,000 women in Ethiopia to receive treatment over the past decades.
  
  Catherine Hamlin has been awarded many medical honorary fellowships and a number of civil honors. In 1983, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia and in 1995 awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for service to gynecology in developing countries, particularly in the field of fistula surgery and for humanitarian service to improving the health dignity and self-esteem of women in Ethiopia. In 1999 and in 2014, she was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. In 2001, Hamlin was included on the Australian Living Legends list and in 2011 was among 50 prominent Australians invited by Governor-General Quentin Bryce to lunch with the Queen. In 2012, Catherine Hamlin earned 2012 an Honorary Ethiopian Citizenship from the Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. In 2014, she became a Distinguished Surgeon of the Year, Society of Gynecological Surgeons, United States. In Australia, her book The Hospital by the River became a bestseller.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Hospital by the River: A Story of Hope

    (Gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamlin left Australia in...)

    2001

Views

Quotations: "Childbirth should be a joyful occasion when a new baby enters the world. But it can go wrong. There must be men and women of compassion and determination so that childbirth for all women can always be safe and babies and mothers saved - from death for the baby and for a life of a living death for the mother."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Ole von Uexkull, Executive Director of the Right Livelihood Foundation, said after Catherine Hamlin's death: "Countless lives in some of the most impoverished parts of the world have been transformed by her dedication and compassion. Thanks to her legacy, the work to eradicate obstetric fistula continues, improving the lives of thousands of women in the years to come."
  
  Carolyn Hardy, chief executive Officer of Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation, said: "To say Catherine was a remarkable woman is an understatement. In our eyes, she was a saint.
  
  Julie White, Chair of Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation said: "Catherine has lived an incredible life having made an enormous difference to the lives and health of thousands upon thousands of women in Ethiopia. Her passionate commitment to women and maternal health through her trust and belief in fulfilling God’s work with love and devotion to others is something that we are all in awe of."

Connections

Catherine Nicholson married Reginald Hamlin in 1950. They had a son, Richard Hamlin, who was born in 1953.

Father:

Theodore Nicholson

Mother:

Elinor Nicholson

husband:

Reginald Henry James Hamlin

In 1948, at the age of 24, Catherine heard of a resident's position opening up at Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney. After applying for the job, she had gained an interview for the position. In a large, plain office, Catherine was interviewed by the medical superintendent at Crown Street. His name was Dr. Reginald Hamlin. In The Hospital By the River, her autobiography written with John Little, Catherine recalls her first impressions of Reginald: "he was of medium height with a good strong jaw, wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and a Roman nose." Their interview was honest and warm. At the time of her interview, she wasn't sure if she wanted to specialize in obstetrics pediatrics. Reginald Hamlin insisted that due to the competitive nature of positions at Crown Street, she would need to find a specialization she was sure she wanted to pursue; the difficulty of obstetrics required total dedication. Catherine was impressive in her interview - Reginald offered her the position that very day. For many years, they had worked together until Reginald Hamlin died in 1993.

Son:

Richard Hamlin

Sister:

Sheila Nicholson

Sister:

Alisha Nicholson

Brother:

Peter Nicholson

Brother:

Donald Nicholson

Brother:

John Nicholson

References

• Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation
• Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia