When Elizabeth Garrett Anderson finally gained membership of the B.M.A. in 1875, the regulations were promptly changed. Although parliament ruled in 1876 to admit women to medicine, the next woman member of the BMA was not accepted until 1894. Inspired by meeting the first American woman doctor, Elizabeth’s resolve met initial family opposition and rejection by UK medical schools.
In 1860, as a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, she was barred from medical lectures by doctors’ complaints: she had come top in the examinations. Discovering that women were not excluded from the Society of Apothecaries’ examination – which granted MD status – Elizabeth passed their exam in 1865.
Like the BMA 15 years later, they immediately changed the rules. Determined to gain a medical degree, she took and passed the Sorbonne’s examination in 1870, but was still not admitted to the Medical Register.
Elizabeth’s career was made possible when she persuaded her father, who had left Whitechapel in 1838 to develop his prosperous family business in Suffolk, to support her. As she wrote to a friend in 1864, ‘My strength lies in the extra amount of daring which I have as a family endowment. All Garretts have it.’ In line with feminist practice, she kept her own surname after marriage to James Anderson, and maintained control of her own earnings.
Establishing the Women’s Dispensary in Marylebone, renamed the New Hospital for Women in 1872, she combined motherhood with work as its Medical Director for 20 years and founded the London Medical School for Women in 1874.
Evelyn Sharp wrote of her at the age of 78, ‘(she) was only old in years, for there was never a younger woman in heart and mind and outlook…’ Mary Lloyd Please send submissions for the next Red Letter Days for famous birthdays or death days between March 1 and May 31. Maximum 300 words per person.
E.G.A 1836–1917