This biography was compiled by Dawn Elder through secondary sources.
Contents
1932 graduate
Marie Payne Buchler graduated from Otago Medical School in 1932. She was awarded the Lady King Fellowship by the University of Otago from 1935 to 1937 and used the award to carry out her MD research: the title of her thesis was ‘An Analysis of 20,319 Obstetrical Case Records of the New Zealand Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society’. The study focused on stillbirths and neonatal deaths, as the Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society and the Plunket Society ‘were anxious to know how much of this wastage of life was preventable’. (1)
This is a remarkable piece of audit research, done without modern methods of documentation to aid analysis. She advocated for postmortem diagnosis and examination of the placenta in these cases. Moreover, she advocated for the importance of determining the primary cause of death, for example, specifying pneumonia in a preterm infant rather than just putting it down to prematurity, which was a co-factor but not the reason for the death. These recommendations are still current for perinatal mortality review.
Marie married lawyer Arthur Buchler in 1934, and their first child was born in April 1936. With a small baby at home, Buchler resigned as honorary medical officer in Dunedin, and the family moved to New Plymouth, where two more daughters were born. (2)
In 1941, Buchler joined the staff of the Department of Health in Wellington, and from then on she was based in Lower Hutt. Her main interest was child health, but she did some general practice and worked as a school medical officer in Petone. She was a vocal advocate for Montgomery Spencer’s call for a review of the infant feeding recommendations of the day, espoused by the Plunket Society; she wrote three letters to Spencer in support of his stand. (3)
While she was working in the Department of Health, Buchler was involved in an important MRC-funded project on screening for tuberculosis: 2204 office and factory workers and secondary school children were screened using a chest X-ray.
Buchler reported that the project found an incidence of active and inactive TB of 2.8 per cent: this showed that not all community cases of TB had been recognised clinically. The data collected from the project was published in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 1944. (4)
During her career, Buchler contributed her expertise and support to St John, the Speech Therapy Association and Plunket, but she did not further develop her research career. She seems to have had difficulty finding someone to help at home so she could continue with her work: she placed a number of advertisements seeking domestic help in the Evening Post, including one headed ‘Wanted urgently!’ (5) Marie Buchler died in 1982.
References:
- Marie Buchler, MD thesis, 1938. https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/esploro/outputs/doctoral/An-analysis-of-20319-obstetrical-case/9926479293001891
- “Nursing Service,” Otago Daily Times, June 13, 1936.
- Christine Daniell, A Doctor at War: A Life in Letters, 1914-43 (Masterton, N.Z.: Fraser Books, 2001).
- Marie Buchler, “Pulmonary Tuberculosis in Wellington. A Radiological Investigation Among Office and Factory Workers and Secondary School Children,” New Zealand Medical Journal 43 (1944): 73–81.
- “Advertisements,” Evening Post, April 27, 1943.
