Beginning in 1929, Bryce was the founding director of the Victoria Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service, which was Australia's first blood transfusion service.[4] Her work involved planning how donors should be screened, and how blood should be typed and stored, and supervising the establishment of a blood reserve in case of major disaster.[5][6]
During World War II, Bryce held the rank of major in the Australian Army Medical Corps[7] and was invited in 1944 to the US with Marjorie Bick to study developments in blood transfusion,[8]then again with Bick in 1945, arriving on the S.S.Kanangoora in March[9] to visit the Hooper Research Foundation in Los Angeles then to New Orleans and Washington,[10] attending a conference of the blood substitute committee of the National Research Council.[11] Bryce then traveled to investigate clinical methods while Bick stayed on at Harvard.[12][13] She reported on the mass production methods at the Cutter Laboratories of packing and shipping plasma and whole blood to be parachuted into the Pacific war zones.[11] Their research coincided with a plan to expand the Blood Bank into a new floor of the Royal Melbourne Hospital.[14]
In 1948, she was called upon as an expert witness in a case involving the identification of two newborns, alleged to have been switched at birth.[15]
Bryce retired from active involvement in the Blood Bank in 1954, but continued to hold her title as honorary chair of the transfusion committee until 1966.[16] She was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951 for this work.[17][18] Bryce wrote a history of the transfusion service, An Abiding Gladness (1965), as well as many scientific articles.[19][20]
There is a crater on Venus named for Bryce,[21] and a portrait of her is on display in Lucy Bryce Hall, which houses the Central Blood Bank in Melbourne.[22] Bryce Place in the Canberra suburb of Florey is named in her honour.[23]
^Penny Robinson, "Australian Red Cross Blood Service" Australian Women's Archive Project, The Australian Women's Register, created 10 February 2004.
^ abM. L. Verso, 'Bryce, Lucy Meredith (1897–1968)'Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 2 January 2016.
^Matthew Klugman, Blood Matters: A Social History of the Victoria Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (Australia Scholarly Publishing 2004). ISBN1740970667
^Australian Red Cross Society.; Australian Red Cross Society. (1965), "v. : ill. ; 25 cm.", Annual report, Melbourne: The Society, ISSN1035-1809, nla.obj-61759344, retrieved 23 July 2022 – via Trove
^Ann Westmore, "Lucy Meredith Bryce"Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback MachineHistory of Medicine, Dentistry, and Health Sciences, Centre for the Study of Health and Society, 8 September 2003.