This biography is based on both written information and an oral interview with Dr Hill conducted with Cindy Farquhar and Dawn Elder in October 2024. All quotations are from this interview. It was collated by Rennae Taylor and Daniel Beaumont. Pictures have been provided by Dr Hill.
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Class of 1967
Family history and childhood
Patricia (Pat) Dorothy Cruickshank was born in Auckland on 19 January 1942 to David and Dorothy Cruickshank. Their second child Warren died of prematurity. Christine, Murray and Pamela joined the family over the ensuing years.
Her father was born in Auckland in 1920 and left school with his proficiency at the age of 13 as his parents were unable to finance his secondary schooling. His first job was at the Auckland Roller Flour Mills which manufactured flour from wheat. He then worked in the office of Buchanan’s Bakery which produced bread and studied bookkeeping at night. His next job was as a traveler for a paint shop, so the family had a car.
Her mother Dorothy was born prematurely in Auckland in 1919 and was not expected to live so was only given one Christian name. Her mother rubbed oil on her and wrapped her in cotton wool. She weighed just 1.3 kgs (lbs) at the time of her birth. She too left school at 13 after passing the proficiency exams. It was the depression, and her family could not afford for her to go to secondary school. She worked in the Nestle factory where they stood on boards with water running beneath the boards to keep the chocolate from melting. Tuberculosis was rife but she did not succumb.
Although her parents had to leave school at age thirteen, they had a strong energetic work ethic. They lived with her maternal grandmother until Pat was five and her mother took in sewing during those years. Their first home was in the suburb of Avondale, using the family benefit as a deposit. After ten years they moved to Blockhouse Bay and in later years Balmoral. Pat remembers her mother as being a great homemaker; she made clothes for the four children, baked, bottled and preserved.
Eventually both her parents ran their own businesses (house painting and catering), and worked closely with the Salvation Army. When Pat was a teenager, two young men came to live with them, one of whom was an orphan with the Salvation Army. They stayed for five and seven years, becoming part of the family and helping with the mortgage. After the children had left home, Pat’s parents spent the last fifteen years of their working life working for the Salvation Army.
Pat attended Auckland Girls Grammar and recalls she did not enjoy her school years after her primary days, and wished she could have gone to a co-ed school. If a boy came on the school grounds, she said, “you’d have thought he came from Mars, you know?”.
Pat realised she wanted to be a doctor when she entered sixth form. Her subjects were English, Geography, Biology and History. Her headmistress tried to talk her out of it and recommended she be a teacher while her biology teacher suggested she be a librarian. Pat was surprised she had obtained university entrance, but dedicated herself to her studies after being inspired by Alfred Bramwell Cook.
Cook was a doctor and high-ranking Salvation Army officer who had started bridge programs in Australia and New Zealand after working in India. “He came to talk to the youth of, you know, of the Salvation Army, and I was inspired. I thought, wow, you know, this is absolutely amazing…” She felt called by God to join a mission after becoming a doctor, to be on the “edge” and help “stop people going over the cliff”.
She had not taken maths, physics, or chemistry, however – making medical intermediate a daunting task.
University and house surgeon years
In 1960, at the age of 18 and with the support of her family, Pat went to Dunedin for her Medical Intermediate. She went by train to Wellington, took the overnight ferry to Christchurch and the train to Dunedin and on arrival found one of her cases was missing. Luckily, she met someone she knew from Auckland, who helped her find it in a shed at the railway station. She loved Dunedin with its beautiful buildings and friendly people and does not recall being homesick.
In the 1950s and 60s, chemistry and physics secondary school teaching for girls was rare, so like many women at the time, Pat felt woefully unprepared for medical intermediate, the year of university study one needed to achieve highly in to be admitted to medical school. It took her three years of persistence to gain entry.
During her first attempt, she felt the professors “could have been talking in Irish.” Her second attempt was more successful, but she still did not achieve high enough marks. On her third attempt, with some extra tutorials in physics from a Miss Blackie, she “got in on my knees. But once I got in I passed everything and I enjoyed it.”
The class of 1967 consisted of 120 students. Only two students had cars and she can only recall two being married. There were seven women at the start and three others joined over the following years and ten women eventually graduated. She recalls one immigrant student, a Dutchman who had been through the war, was married and had children. His wife ran a boarding house so he could do medicine. He was the only one she recalls who smoked. Pat was a non-smoker and drinker.
Social life was limited, and she only recalls the occasional party and date. She felt her class got on well and they got to know each other over the years. The other women in her cohort included Ailsa Barker, Wendy Hadden, Janet Lewis, Jocelyn Williams, Doreen Bolton, Elizabeth Purvis, and Ann Lang.
Men and women were not seated separately, and she felt the women were treated with respect by her peers. However, she recalls some of the specialists who gave lectures could be arrogant and “not very pleasant to the women.” One surgeon in particular was particularly “awful to the women”. She was the only woman at her dissection table, but her “guys protected me” from the surgeon.
Classes consisted of lectures from 9am to 12pm. Practical sessions were in the afternoon and most days ended by 5pm. Medicine was her favourite subject. She loved the clinical experiences where she was allotted a patient to interview and examine in the hospital. She recalls her fifth-year public health project was “Children with Duchenne Type of Muscular Dystropy”. She interviewed 21 children and their families and received a prize.
Pat had a student bursary each term and during her Medical Intermediate years she worked in a Dunedin factory. She could not afford to stay in a University hostel, like St Margaret’s, so instead she boarded privately with people from the Salvation Army. She met the son of one of these families, Harold, a teacher at Gore High School, who she married eight years later in 1972. She always had her own room, and the family and other boarders ate together. One of her best friends was not successful in getting into medicine so enrolled in music. They are still in contact.
Her parents would usually pay for her to come home once a year over Christmas and Pat tried not to ask them for money knowing they had three other children to consider.
She mostly travelled back by train and boat, twice she hitch-hiked up the islands with a friend and twice her parents paid for her to fly. She recalls it was easy to get a summer job and worked in the McKenzie Queen Street Department Store and one year at a laboratory. She also did night sleepovers for an elderly lady. She knew how much money she needed for the next year and made sure she had enough.
She recalls that she used to be ashamed that it took so long for her to get into Medical School but with hindsight realizes that with no secondary school maths, physics, and very little in the way of sciences, she was fighting against the odds.
She did her final sixth year and house surgeon years at Auckland Hospital and stayed in a hostel near Auckland Hospital. She felt unprepared for this transition and found the hospital hours long and scary: “You were pushed into the universe, like in the firing line. Put up drips and do this and do that. You had no idea how to do any of it.” She got on well with both staff and patients and enjoyed her interactions with them. She was paid $1000 for the year, and she could account for every cent of it. “It lasted long after I left NZ”.
She felt proud for herself and for her family that she had achieved this milestone and was ready to face the next stage of the journey. Her goal was to specialise in Tropical Medicine and work in the Salvation Army Missions for the rest of her life.
Early overseas career
Before signing up with the Salvation Army “for life”, she wanted to see what it would be like. In January 1970, a position became available at one of their hospitals in Zambia. She felt this experience would be more useful than staying in NZ. She travelled by ship and worked as one of three doctors at Chikankata Hospital until July 1971. She recalls:
We had a wonderful Salvation Army officer who was a physician there, Paul du Plessis… truckfuls of people would arrive with abnormal chest x-rays. Everybody thought that they had TB, which was rampant. And he said, put them in your ward, sort them out, work out if it is TB, and then we’ll put them in the TB wards… Out in the rural areas, I’m not exaggerating, hundreds would line up for their leprosy and TB medication…. We had 500 people in a leprosarium attached to [Chikankata Hospital].
Other conditions and diseases she regularly dealt with included malnutrition, diarrhoea, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, malaria, and anaemia.
During her year in Zambia, Pat found herself in charge of the hospital during a traumatic event that she would not fully come to terms with for decades.
One day, a nurse called Pat over to the children’s ward. There, she found four children dead.
Blood, brown. Methemoglobinemia. I knew a poison had been given to them. The only thing we had was methylene blue that stained the slides in the laboratory. Shot into their veins and saved 13 of them… the people blamed me because I was in charge of the hospital. That night I can remember the crying, the howling of the parents taking their children home. There was a riot at the hospital. They were going to kill me.
She stayed with some friends that night, and the police arrived a week later, but Pat did not find out who poisoned the children or why they did it for another 30 years.
I couldn’t write home to tell my parents and tell them what happened. I never told Harold for years what happened. I thought nobody had asked me to come to Africa. I offered… I’m not their sister. I’m their servant. And if they misinterpret it. Me. So be it. That’s the only way I could, I could process it. And talk about post-traumatic stress. I was sent down for a holiday for a few days to Zimbabwe to fellow New Zealanders… I got through it… [but] there was no such thing as counselling.
30 years later, when reading a history of the Salvation Army in Zambia, Pat found out that “trainee young men who were being trained in the laboratory and the pharmacy had got onto drugs. And they put the wrong stuff into the electrolyte mixture… It was terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
This experience did not deter her from serving with the Salvation Army. In July 1971 Pat went to London to be trained as a Salvation Army officer and receive further medical qualifications. She worked in obstetrics in the East End of London and obtained her Diplomas in both Tropical Medicine and Obstetrics. She also reconnected with Harold, after eight years of not seeing each other, and they were married in 1972.
They were sent by the Salvation Army to Zimbabwe in 1972, during the civil war (1972-1979). He taught at a secondary school, and she worked in the hospital running the obstetrics department for the next six years. While in Zimbabwe, Pat’s parents joined her for three years to support her and Harold and also contribute to the Salvation Army’s work there. They helped Pat and Harold care for their two daughters, Ruth and Mary, born in 1973 and 1976.
Pat did 2000 deliveries a year while in Zimbabwe. Many women visited the antenatal clinic but had their babies in their villages, supported by older women who lived there. After birth, it was a common practice to put cow dung on the umbilical cord. The doctors advised that this practice was leading to tetanus in babies, but it was safer to give mothers tetanus toxoid and “a little matchbox that had in it a razor blade, two bits of string, and two cotton wool bits.”
She worked until she was eight months pregnant with her first and until the day of delivery with the second. She went back to part-time work almost immediately. She considers one of her main career achievements was leaving Zimbabwe having trained up the midwives in the maternity department in the absence of a resident doctor. During the two years without one, not a single mother or baby was lost.
Later career
On their return to New Zealand in 1978, Pat found there were challenges to being a Salvation Army officer and establishing a career as a medical doctor. They were sent where the Army directed. She did some locums, but the Army saw her main role as supporting her husband in leading churches in Mosgiel, Invercargill, and then Wellington. However, Pat found ways of still working in Medicine. This included two years as a full-time Medical Officer in the Dunedin Health Department while Harold completed a theology degree. She continued half-time in this role in Invercargill. They returned to Wellington in 1987, where Pat sought to work full time.
She was finally released to work full-time in the Te Aro Health Centre (TAHC) which she found most rewarding. The centre, established in 1985, had grown out of the early work of a group of retired doctors, including her fellow classmate Ann Lang’s father, Dr Ernst Philipp.
The TAHC supported a bridge programme for addiction run by the Salvation Army, the Downtown Ministry who worked with the homeless seeking accommodation, the Sisters of Compassion running a soup kitchen and the board running a night shelter. It was “high quality, low cost healthcare to those on low income.” The TAHC had a strong team and was one of the first clinics to receive accreditation from Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners in 2004.
Following her time in TAHC, Pat found it difficult to be admitted to a peer review group and get a secure position separate from a Salvation Army role, as the clinic she had worked at while in Zimbabwe, effectively a first aid post on the battlefront, was not always recognised as legitimate. In the end the College of General Practitioners helped her find a peer review group, where she wasn’t allowed to present a case but was able to contribute to the discussion. Eventually, she ran the After Hours Medical Centres Peer Review group for many years.
Dr Hill received the Queen’s Service Medal in 2008 for her services to community health. In particular, the development of the TAHC into a model accredited inner city medical practice was noted. Through low cost, accessible medical care the clinic helped advance the physical and mental health of the poor, homeless and immigrants. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal NZ College of General Practitioners, has been a teacher of medical students and an examiner and supervisor of the College’s primary membership examination.
Retirement
Pat retired in 2007 and became involved in some community groups including her church and coffee mornings. She enjoys reading, gardening and supporting her five grandchildren. Harold died in 2020 at the age of 78.
As she looks back on her life at the age of 82, she writes “Medicine was a hard taskmaster, and I am glad my daughters have not followed me into medicine.” Instead, Ruth is a journalist and Mary is a graphic designer.
Although working and motherhood gave her a greater understanding of women working and caring for their children, Pat’s advice to women embarking on a medical career is: “Be prepared that it is very hard to combine a career in medicine in motherhood.”
