After receiving medical degrees at the University of Sydney, he served as resident medical officer at several hospitals in the early 1950s. He pursued additional medical studies in London before coming to the Crown Street hospital in 1955. A 1988 article in The Sydney Morning Herald said he had delivered some 1,500 babies there before the hospital closed in 1983.
In 1960 a representative of Distillers Company, which marketed thalidomide in Britain, came calling, and Dr. McBride agreed to try the drug on some patients. He was the only doctor using it at the hospital when the problems arose, which enabled the quick identification of its link to the birth defects.
Among the many controversies surrounding Dr. McBride was whether he was actually the first to make the connection regarding his patients. In 1987, after the Australian Broadcasting Corporation medical journalist Norman Swan, himself a doctor, broadcast a segment questioning Dr. McBride’s Bendectin research, news reports on the resulting uproar said that it was actually a nurse, Pat Sparrow, who originally noted the thalidomide link. Dr. McBride was said to have initially resisted her suggestion that the drug was at fault but soon adopted that view.
In any case, in long legal proceedings over thalidomide, which was eventually implicated in thousands of birth defects, Dr. McBride asserted that he had tried to bring his concerns to the attention of the drug company but was rebuffed.
“He had no idea of the concept that a drug company would not be pleased to hear from him when he said, ‘There is something wrong with your drug,’ ” his daughter Catherine McBride told The Australian. “He thought he would be saving them a lot of money.”
His efforts won him accolades of all sorts. They also brought him a thriving practice and a cash award from L’Institut de la Vie in France. In 1971 he used that money to set up Foundation 41 — named for the 41 weeks between conception and birth — to study the causes of mental and physical problems in newborns.
As a result of research Dr. McBride conducted about the possible risks of Bendectin (also known as Debendox), he became a sought-after expert witness in lawsuits against Merrell Dow, the manufacturer, that blamed the drug for birth defects. But others said the drug was safe. In one case in the early 1980s, Dr. McBride and Dr. Lenz, another thalidomide hero, testified for opposite sides. The company took the drug off the market in 1983, maintaining that it was safe but saying that making it was no longer cost effective, in part because of the controversies surrounding it.
