Dorothy Stopford Price : Short Biography

Dorothy Stopford was born in Dublin on the 9th of September 1890 to Jemmett and Constance Stopford. Her father was employed by the British civil service in Dublin and her mother was the daughter of the master of the Rotunda hospital. The family were well connected in the Church of Ireland and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. In 1902, Dorothy's father died of typhoid fever and the family relocated to London where Dorothy attended St Paul's school for girls.

In 1915 Dorothy returned to Ireland to study medicine at Trinity College. This meant that she was in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising. Though she was staying with a British Administrator in the Phoenix Park, Dorothy became increasingly sympathetic to the Irish Nationalist cause. Her sympathies were most likely influenced by her aunt Alice Stopford-Green who was an outspoken figure in London society on the subject of colonial abuses in Africa. 

Dorothy graduated in medicine in 1922 and moved to Cork where she worked in the Kilbrittain Dispensary. Whilst in this role, she became the medical officer to the local branch of the IRA. She resigned from her post in Cork in 1925 when she married a barrister named Liam Price and moved back to Dublin where the pair lived on Fitzwilliam Square. She took up a post in St Ultan's Hospital for infants. She would also go on to work in the Baggot Street Hospital. Dorothy began to study the BCG, which was the vaccination for tuberculosis, a pulmonary disease which had a devastating effect upon the people of Ireland. She studied the use of the vaccine in Europe and pioneered the introduction of the BCG to Ireland. In 1949 the National BCG centre was set up in St Ultan's and Dorothy was appointed as chairman. Her contributions to the control of TB in Ireland saw Dorothy being nominated for the Leon Bernard prize by the World Health Organisation. She became the consulting physician to the Royal National Hospital for Consumptives. 

Dr Dorothy Stopford Price died of a stroke on the 30th of January 1954. Her medical diaries are held by the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.