Missing memorial shocks women's health advocates

Health campaigner Lynda Williams is dismayed by the plaque's removal. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Women's health campaigners were horrified this week to discover that a plaque commemorating two of the whistle-blowers on the "unfortunate experiment" at National Women's Hospital has been removed.

Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the public release of the Cartwright Report on the inquiry into Dr Herbert Green's unethical study at the Auckland hospital into carcinoma of the cervix.

An Otago University study published in June found a 10-fold higher rate of cancer among women initially managed with small diagnostic biopsies during the study period, than among women given treatments intended to cure them.

To mark the anniversary, as they do every year, a small group of women gathered outside the former National Women's Hospital building in Epsom on Thursday to remember the women harmed by the study - and those harmed by the cervical screening failure in Gisborne in the 1990s.

They went to pay their respects at the plaque, at the other side of the building, which commemorates the work of two of the doctors who spoke out against the study, Jock McLean and Bill McIndoe.

The metal plaque, mounted on concrete, was placed by the Women's Health Action Trust in 1993.

Auckland Women's Health Council co-ordinator Lynda Williams said yesterday she and the other five women at the commemoration on Thursday were struck with "horror, disbelief" when they realised the plaque had gone.

"It felt like a desecration. We started digging around with our umbrellas in case it had got covered up with leaves."

Ms Williams suspected the plaque's removal was motivated by scepticism about the Cartwright findings arising out of the debate generated by Professor Linda Bryder's book, A History of the "Unfortunate Experiment" at National Women's Hospital.

But that view was dismissed by a supporter of the late Dr Green, National Women's Health specialist Dr Tony Baird, who said: "... the people who question the fairness of the Cartwright inquiry and who accept the validity of the research by Linda Bryder would never stoop to that level."

Auckland District Health Board chief executive Garry Smith said the plaque would be replaced.

It had been removed without permission, and its whereabouts was unknown.