Episode 12: Special Feature - Dr Louie Mary Mangar

Louie Mary Mangar was born in 1937 in Norwich, England. Louie fostered a perpetual familiarity with adversity around her even from an early age, starting with a childhood scarred by the second world war from her first conscious memories.

Upon qualification as a doctor from Sheffield University, she secured one of the most sort-after paediatric rotations in Derbyshire joining Professor Ronald Illingworth  to take up a research post into hydrocephalus. Illingworth was a formidable researcher,  author of the legendary paediatric text book The Normal Child.  Having withdrawn from an offer of a prestigious research career, she chose a path in family medicine to devote herself more to her growing son. She had the accolade of being one of the  youngest female GP at the time to be a GP partner, taking over a practice in Sheffield at the age of 27. Moving to London, she made a particular point of working in deprived areas of the East End of London in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time of depression and angst. 

Later in her career, she provided pioneering services within the Women’s National Cancer Control Campaign, an early precursor to national breast and cervical screening programmes, both formally introduced in the UK in 1988. Before these years, women’s health suffered almost constitutionally n the UK. With regards to cervical screening, the 1970s and 1980s were mostly  haphazard and chaotic in the NHS, the Lancet reporting in 1985 the appalling missed results and backlogs of tests unreported.

Retiring  in 1997 having lost an ongoing battle with aggressive connective tissue disease, she spent her time prison visiting, working with the MOD as a combat stress counsellor, and trying to find purpose after a lifelong conveyor belt of demand on her. 

She gave so much more than she took, and women in medicine like her made the NHS what it was, and wouldn’t be the first women in medicine who gave a weekly pound of flesh. Ultimately the career and work took everything from her, and she devoted herself to it, sacrificing her health and life for what she believed in.