Innovative expert on kidney transplants who founded the North's renal service

Mollie McGeown: Prof Mollie McGeown CBE DSc MD PhD FRCP(Lon) FRCP (Edin) FRCPI, who died aged 81 last Sunday in Belfast, was recognised worldwide as an innovative expert on kidney transplants and the founder of the North's renal service.

The "Belfast recipe" which she and her team developed in Belfast's City Hospital in the 1960s - minimising use of the toxic drugs used to fight rejection, and partnering it with meticulous patient care - gave results so good they were the subject of international debate.

As a woman in medicine half a century ago Mollie McGeown had to fight for a specialist post. She overcame prejudice by being so outstanding that even the upper ranks of a misogynist profession had to acknowledge her. She further confounded those who believed it impossible for women to combine medicine with motherhood by managing to have a happy family life.

Born in Lurgan to a farming family, Mollie McGeown showed academic brilliance early, passing final school examinations a year before she was deemed mature enough to attend Queen's University. The family was not wealthy: she spoke laughingly later of discovering electric light and running water when she came to Queen's.

She won prizes throughout her student career, then spent several years in laboratory medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

She began research on kidney stones, and the Queen's professor of medicine, Graham Bull, encouraged her to work in the unpopular sphere of renal disease. But her life's work emerged from disquiet that kidney patients had to travel to London or Cambridge for the treatment, then comparatively novel, of dialysis.

When a young man developed acute kidney failure in 1958 and had to be flown to Hammersmith Hospital in London, the Stormont government of the day decided that Northern Ireland should have its own facilities.

Mollie McGeown was given the job of establishing and directing a dialysis service at the City Hospital. A senior colleague commented much later that she had certainly met "gender prejudice in those first years, but her expertise in a subject that interested few others made her the obvious person for the task."

She formed lifelong friendships with the two specialists similarly engaged in Dublin, Tony Walsh and Billy O'Dwyer, then setting up the renal unit in Jervis Street Hospital. The three encouraged each other in a new and unnerving area of medical effort, and established permanent co-operation between units North and South.

Mollie McGeown recruited dedicated nurses, surgeons and anaesthetists, set up training courses and began a study of immuno-suppressant drugs, showing a talent for administration to match her research and medical skills.

In 1977 an article in the Lancet detailed "100 kidney transplants in the Belfast City Hospital". It had an immediate impact. No other centre of the time had achieved a similar low mortality rate or equally successful graft survival.

International discussion of "the centre effect" questioned why the same surgical procedure should have such different results from one centre to another. The present medical director of the City's renal unit, Dr Ciaran Doherty, was Mollie McGeown's registrar in 1975 and attributes the results to "Mollie's daring choice of much lower doses of immuno-suppressants combined with her personal care of patients."

Many early colleagues were discomfited by the technology, and the reality, of dialysis and transplants. In the early 1970s viral hepatitis killed a number of doctors and nurses working in dialysis in Edinburgh and London.

The Belfast unit was closed for over six months in 1971 before the problem was solved by stringent infection control including the testing of patients for hepatitis B and unremitting hand-washing.

The major ethical dilemma in renal treatment as in so many other medical spheres was, and remains, that of having more patients than it is possible to treat. Each patient for dialysis needs exclusive use of a machine for many hours. For years Mollie McGeown took the ultimate responsibility, painful and scarring in the view of colleagues, for deciding priority cases.

She "railed against the Troubles", colleagues recall. In addition to the ravages of illness they now had to deal with acute kidney failure in people crushed by bombed and collapsed buildings, injured by high explosive or in shootings.

She was awarded the CBE for services to medicine, became the first professorial fellow in medicine at Queen's University in 1988 and on the 50th anniversary of the National Health Service in 1998 was named as one of the 50 women who had contributed most to its success.

She said then that she would like to be remembered "as one who was glad, indeed proud, to have been part of the NHS". She did no private work.

In 2002 Queen's commissioned a portrait of Prof McGeown (by Larry Coulter) to hang in its ceremonial Great Hall, the first woman subject among rows of men. Present for the unveiling with many of her family, including her brother, Willie, son, Paul Freeland, with his wife, Alison, and two of her grandsons, she said the painting made her look too stern but liked the setting, a view of the family farm near Aghalee, Co Armagh. "If I'd looked so formidable I'd have frightened my patients off," she said.

The Queen's Vice-Chancellor, Sir George Bain, said her unit had saved approximately "3,000 souls". Last August the Belfast Telegraph brought 10 former patients together, some of them the longest survivors of kidney transplants in the world. Her closest colleague in the 1970s, Dr James Douglas, paid tribute to the techniques she introduced and said: "These people are evidence of our success".

Prof McGeown said how proud she was of renal patients and asked people to tell their families that they wanted their organs donated after they died.

Mollie McGeown married a senior administrator in Queen's, Max Freeland, widowed with two sons: they had three sons together. Max Freeland died in 1982. She is survived by her stepson, John, and sons, Peter, Mark and Paul.

Mary G. (Mollie) McGeown: born July 19th, 1923; died November 21st, 2004