The eldest of 12 siblings, Mary Martin was born Marie Martin, in 1892 in Glenageary, County Dublin, Ireland. During World War I in 1914, when she was 22 years old, she began a three-month training course at the Richmond Hospital in Dublin as a Voluntary Aid Detachment, preparing to nurse wounded soldiers. A year later she was sent to Malta to work in St. George’s Military Hospital and then to France, to care for the wounded during the horrific Battle of the Somme that lasted for 147 days. It was here that she gained experience in nursing young men with gas gangrene and poisoning and skin diseases like scabies and impetigo. After her 25th birthday, Marie told her boyfriend that marriage was not for her and trained as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street in Dublin. In 2021, she sailed for Nigeria to work as a lay volunteer.
Marie Martin recognised a dire need for the establishment of a congregation of religious sisters specifically qualified as medical professionals. However, given the restrictions under ‘Propaganda Fide’ in Rome which forbade members of religious orders from practising obstetrics or giving aid in childbirth, this proved difficult. In 1918 Marie was introduced to Frances Moloney, who later co-founded the Missionary Sisters of St. Columban and later Mother Kevin, foundress of the Franciscan Sisters for Africa. Together these three women worked relentlessly to advocate for permission for religious Sisters to pioneer medical care responses for women in China, Niger, Uganda and elsewhere.
Their persistence paid off and in 1936 Pope Pius XI granted permission and the Medical Missionaries of Mary were established. On 4 April 1937, Mary Martin was professed as a nun with the Medical Missionaries of Mary while seriously ill in the hospital in Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria. On medical advice, she returned home to Ireland, where she opened a house for students at Booterstown, County Dublin and a novitiate at Collon, County Louth. Later and in response to local requests, she established a maternity hospital in Drogheda in December 1939, and the International Missionary Training Hospital in 1957.
Mother Mary Martin was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal from the International Red Cross in 1963. In 1966, she was the first woman to be made a ‘freeman’ of Drogheda and was also the first woman to be inducted into the honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland (RCSI). Mother Mary Martin died on January 27, 1975.
Today there are 400 Sisters, who come from 18 different nationalities working in Angola, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Republic of Benin, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Video: Marie Martin
