Jane Stocks Greig
12 June 1872 – 16 September 1939
Medical Doctor & Public Health Specialist
Jane Stocks "Jean" Greig was a Scottish-Australian medical doctor and public health specialist.
Greig was born in 1872 in Cupar, Scotland, to Robert Greig and Jane Stocks, and was the oldest of seven children. Robert Greig encouraged his children to pursue tertiary education, and encouraged his two oldest daughters, Jane and Janet, to study medicine. When Jane was 17, the Greig family moved to Australia and settled in Melbourne, Victoria, where Jane and Janet enrolled at the medical school of the University of Melbourne in 1891.
Jane Greig graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Medicine in 1895, and completed her Bachelor of Surgery with honours in 1896. After leaving university, she worked in general practice in the Melbourne suburbs of Brighton and Fitzroy, and founded the Victorian Medical Women's Society. She was a founding member of the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women and Children in 1896 and was an honorary medical staff member at the hospital until 1910.
Greig returned to the University of Melbourne to study a Diploma of Public Health; when she completed the degree in 1910 she became the first woman at the university to do so. She went on to work for the Victorian Department of Education as a medical officer, providing healthcare services for schoolchildren, and was promoted to the department's Chief Medical Officer in 1929. From 1924 to 1925, she was a commissioner on the Royal Commission on Health. She visited a number of countries to give talks on types medical and dental inspection and published numerous articles and reports in the Medical Journal of Australia. She was a lecturer in hygiene at the University of Melbourne and at the Teachers' Training College from 1916 to 1939.
Greig died from cancer in 1939 in Richmond, Victoria. She was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2007, and in 2012 she was featured in an Australian postage stamp series titled "Medical Doctors".
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