Doris Durlacher

Miriam Dorothy Durlacher, known as Doris Durlacher, was a nurse and midwife in Toodyay, Western Australia, who lived from 1870 to 1942. Born on 14 March 1870 at White Peak Station near Geraldton, she was raised in Fremantle and Perth and briefly ran a school for young children before working as a nurse. The Health Act of 1911 required midwives to be registered, and by 1913 she was one of the women on the first Register of Midwives in Western Australia. Over her career she delivered 190 babies and lost only one, often attending families in remote outback homes for very small payment, and she was remembered as a guardian angel in those homes. She resigned from the hospital in January 1925 to take up private nursing, retired around 1930, was active in the Karrakatta Club and died in Perth on 10 May 1942.