The University of Edinburgh has
just welcomed its latest intake of medical students, a new wave of young faces
eager to begin their medical careers. Around 60% of these new students are
female, but when Sophia Jex-Blake applied to study medicine in 1869 she was
denied - it was not considered practicable to make alternative arrangements for
one lone woman. Undeterred, she advertised for more women to join her, and
eventually gathered a group who would become known as the ‘Edinburgh Seven’.
These seven began their medical education on 2nd November 1869.
All seven performed well in their
first exams, with Edith Pechey topping the class and qualifying for a prestigious
scholarship, but the staff had noticed a growing sense of unhappiness amongst
the male students, and awarded it instead to one of them in an effort to quell
this. As the events of 1870 would show, this was not particularly effective…
Then, as now, the time spent on
wards was crucial for producing well-rounded doctors - as any medical practitioner
will know, there is a big difference between learning the theories of diagnosis
and treatment, and the reality of dealing with disease ‘in the flesh’. The
female students wanted to be able to experience the wards alongside their male
counterparts, and requested that they be allowed to join the clinical classes
that were taught on the wards. To many of the male students, however, the idea
of a female element in their midst was nothing less than horrifying, and a
petition was presented to the Board of Management of the Royal Infirmary of
Edinburgh (RIE) in protest. In total, five hundred and four students had signed
the petition, with the petitioners being keen to point out that four hundred
and ninety of those had been gathered in the first seven hours…
The issues hinged on the question
of propriety. Was it proper for a lady to be present on a ward, where medical
examinations were taking place? Would the men be able to comfortably discuss
medical concerns in the presence of women? The petitions didn’t think so:
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| "many subjects of the gravest medical importance will be imperfectly treated, or omitted altogether" [LHB1/1/25] |
The Board of Management was
divided. It was decided that the opinions of the Physicians and Surgeons of the
RIE should first be sought. In the meantime, Jex-Blake wrote to the Board. In a
letter that sounds both begging and defiant, she suggests that only those
physicians and surgeons who want to
teach the ‘Lady Students’ would have to – “both as a matter of courtesy and because
we shall already be provided with sufficient means of instruction”:
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| LHB1/1/25 |
The infamous Surgeons Hall Riotoccurred two days later.
The matter remained unsettled for
some time. Under pressure from some influential contributors, the Board were
convinced that the female students should be allowed access, but the question
remained of how to implement this without resorting to objectionable and
improper mixed classes. This question continued for a number of months – in October
1872 opinions were sought from the medical and surgical staff, asking whether
they were in favour of admitting the women at all, and if so, how they proposed
this medical instruction could take place. The responses varied; while some
were encouraging, many could not see their way clear to the women being present
and involved in medical examinations:
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| "I am not prepared to give clinical instruction to mixed classes, on account of my own feeling of its impropriety and fear of evil results following" - letter to the Managers of the RIE from J Matthews Duncan, 31 Oct 1872 [LHB1/73/1/6] |
We’ll be sharing more of these
letters over on our Twitter page over the course of the next week.
Eventually, the board agreed to allow women to attend classes
on the wards, but these were held at different hours to the men’s’; they were
only allowed to visit certain wards; they were permitted no access to post -mortems,
surgical operations; and they were not allowed to work as clerks or dressers as
this could lead to “inextricable confusion”:
 |
| [LHB1/1/26] |
A further example of women’s
fight to be accepted by the medical society of Edinburgh can be seen in the
minute book of the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh (GD3). In 1892, Grace Cadell wrote to the Society requesting a form for membership. This appears to
have prompted something of an urgent discussion amongst the members, and Grace
soon received a letter informing her that “the Society has passed a law asserting
that its membership shall be confined to Medical Practitioners of the male sex”.
 |
| [GD3/2/3] |
The barriers to the education of women weren’t always as
regulatory, though. Women were granted the right to apply for residency
placements (working as an appointed House Officer in a hospital) in the 1920s,
but were not permitted to live in the Residency itself until the late 1940s. As
the residency rules show, this was an environment very much geared towards its
male inhabitants. I wonder how easily a woman would have fitted in with this
bunch…
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| Rules of the Residency [LHB1/114/2] |
The fight to be fully accepted in
the medical community continued well into the 1950s. Both the Bruntsfield
Hospital and the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital (EIMH) were closely associated
with the idea of providing practical medical experience to young female doctors.
Indeed, Bruntsfield Hospital took its name from Bruntsfield Lodge, Sophia
Jex-Blake’s former home. In 1957, the resignation of a consultant physician at
Deaconess and Longmore Hospital prompted the Regional Health Board to reconsider
staffing arrangements across the Lothian area. A suggestion was put forward that
a locum physician could work between EIMH, Bruntsfield Hospital & Deaconess
Hospital – which could result in a male doctor working in the two women’s
hospitals. This proposal was met with some anger. As Gertrude Herzfeld pointed
out at a Board meeting on 9th November, “if a woman was not appointed,
there would be no woman consultant physician in the Edinburgh Area to whom
woman patients could be referred and there was a definite demand for the services
of a woman consultant physician in the area”.
 |
| [LHB9/1/9] |
Instrumental in the campaign
against this appointment was Helen Miller Lowe. Lowe was one of the first
female chartered accountants in Scotland, and had a lifelong interest in the
medical profession, acting as treasurer of both EIMH and Bruntsfield Hospital
when they were transferred to the NHS. The GD34 collection contains correspondence,
campaign papers, press cuttings and reports relating to the campaign she
spearheaded. This garnered support from those both near to home and further
afield (with some encouragement coming from a familiar name!)
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| [GD34/1/4] |
The campaign was a successful
one, with the RHB capitulating in Feb 1958 and agreeing that all of the vacant posts
at the Brunts & EIMH be retained for women only.
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| [LHB9/1/10] |
For more information, check out the
Wikipedia pages on Women in Medicine.
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