“The first thing women must learn is to dress like ladies and behave like gentlemen,” Elizabeth Garrett Anderson used to tell her medical students. She was one of those strange rebels – not uncommon throughout our history – who create revolutions while all the time thinking of themselves as quite conservative.
Garrett Anderson passed her apothecary exams on this date, becoming the first woman to become a licentiate of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. The Society immediately closed a loophole in its rules to ensure that no other women could wriggle their way through. This retrospective slamming of stable doors by organisations determined to remain men-only became something of a theme in EGA’s career.
She was born in London in 1836 and raised in Suffolk, where her businessman father became gradually prosperous. It was a family of achievers, entrepreneurial and intellectual; amongst Elizabeth’s nine siblings was Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist. Mr Garrett (though not, apparently, his wife) believed that girls should get as much education as boys, a view that was quite widespread amongst the pragmatically progressive middle classes of the era, who had no time for the sentimental ideas of the old ruling class.
Elizabeth received schooling at home and as a boarder, and seems to have been determined from an early age to become a doctor. That was impossible, of course; there weren’t really any specific rules banning girls from becoming medical students, but only because such a thing was so obviously unthinkable.
Every Harley Street doctor she approached to mentor her turned her down, even though she was often accompanied at the interviews by her father, to demonstrate his approval and therefore her respectability. Every medical school she applied to told her firmly that they did not take female students.
EGA’s next strategic move was to become a nurse at Middlesex Hospital. With her foot in the door she began to infiltrate herself, bit by bit, into the academic world, proving herself through her work and her privately-funded study. But then some medical students formally complained that they kept bumping into this bloody woman everywhere they went – in the operating theatre, in the dissecting room, even sitting in on some of the peripheral lectures. Her time at the Middlesex came to a sudden end.
This was when the apothecary ruse arose. Being licensed by the Worshipful Society didn’t carry the prestige of becoming a Doctor of Medicine, but it did mean that you could legally practice as a physician. (The Society only let her onto the course when her father threatened to take them to court if they didn’t.)
Now officially the first woman to hold a British medical qualification, Elizabeth set up in practice on her own (no-one else would have her), and once she got started there wasn’t much hope of stopping her. She went on to become, over the following decades, co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first female dean of a medical school, the first female surgeon and consultant in Britain, the first female magistrate in Britain, the first female member of a British school board - and the first female MD in France. That last record is a long story, but it did mean that the British Medical Association was unable to refuse her membership in 1873. (The BMA quickly amended its rules to keep women out, but by the end of the century they’d surrendered; not only were women allowed to join, but EGA herself was elected president of the Association’s East Anglia section.)
In 1902, EGA and her husband retired to Aldeburgh, where she died in 1917, having been elected mayor in 1908. It goes without saying, I suppose, that she was the first female mayor in Britain.
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Sources:
www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/britain%E2%80%99s-first-female-doctor
www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/11-little-known-things-about-elizabeth-garrett-anderson/
www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp65487/elizabeth-garrett-anderson
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elizabeth-garrett-anderson-woman-no-other