Anne Bruce Hill, MB BCh BAO 1962 (Died 16 November 2020, aged 82)
Obituary provided by classmate and friend, Mark Reid.
Anne was born in Lisburn on 5 November 1938 and went to Friends School in Lisburn. When she started to study medicine at Queen’s she was in a band of only ten women in her year of sixty plus. Although being in a female minority she was in no way intimated, and she ably fended off any perceived slights from her male colleagues. She would peer at them piercingly over her glasses and put them in their place. She and her late lifelong friend Eleanor Lowe were never slow to take up the offer of a party, after a long afternoon in the anatomy dissection room or a less than inspiring lecture. With her bright auburn (not ginger, thank you) hair and pale clear complexion she was easy to spot in the class. She was always good company and happy to exchange stories of the goings on in the wards. Later when we were qualified when relaxing off duty in the Doctors quarters, she would entertain the rest of us making fun of our peers, and some of the more bizarre patients’ stories. She continued in her first few years in the Belfast City Hospital, and then went to the Royal Victoria Hospital to take up her chosen speciality of anaesthetics from 1965 to 1971.
She then took the decision like many other Queen’s graduates of that era, that it was time to fly over “the pond” to the USA. In her case to the University of Michigan to further develop her skills. She did this most ably, eventually becoming Chief of Anaesthesiology in the veterans’ Ann Arbor Medical Centre. After twenty years or so she finally became the Director of Services in the Kellogg Eye Centre.
However, her time there was not all about medicine, as she fortunately and happily met Bruce, an American mathematics academic in Ann Arbor. They got married and eventually after her retirement in 1998 moved to the delights of tropical Hawaii on Maui, to their house sited on slopes of a volcano! Despite living half a world away from her birthplace she was always keen to come back to revisit her friends, and especially her medical classmates; at their regular reunions in Ireland and Canada. She was only too keen to reminisce and listen to the tales and tall stories from her student friends and tell of her own adventures in North America.
She is remembered very fondly for her determination to always improve the care and treatment for her patients, and her long standing friendships with her fellow graduates of 1962.
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