Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, born on this day in history in London, England, was an English physician and suffragist. She was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in Britain.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson by Swaine. A Wellcome Collection image via UK Science Museum
At age 24, Anderson began serving as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital in London. She unsuccessfully attempted to enroll in the hospital’s medical school but was allowed to have private sessions in Latin, Greek and pharmacology with the hospital’s apothecary, while continuing her work as a nurse. She also employed a tutor to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. Eventually she was allowed into lectures until the male students complained and she was barred. She was obliged to leave the Middlesex Hospital but she did so with an honors certificate in chemistry and materia medica (pharmacology). Anderson then applied to several medical schools, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and the Royal College of Surgeons, all of which refused her admittance.
The UK Science Museum writes about the reasons men were opposed to women being doctors:
It was thought that women were biologically unable to cope with the stresses and strains of work and higher education.
For example, a Dr Edward H. Clark published his book ‘Sex in Education’ in 1873 in which he argued:
‘higher education in women produces monstrous brains and puny bodies, abnormally active cerebration and abnormally weak digestion, flowing thought and constipated bowels’.
Menstruation, pregnancy and the menopause were thought to leave women frail, unstable and incapacitated, making them unsuitable for public life.”
A BBC history reports that the Society of Apothecaries did not specifically forbid women from taking their examinations. Thus in 1865 she passed their exams (with the highest scores) and gained a certificate which enabled her to become a doctor. The society immediately changed its rules to prevent other women entering the profession this way.
With her father’s backing, in 1866 she established a dispensary for women in London and in 1870 was made a visiting physician to the East London Hospital. Here she met James Anderson, a successful businessman, who she married in 1871 and with whom she had three children.
She remained determined to obtain a medical degree, so she taught herself French and went to the University of Paris, where she successfully earned her degree. The British Medical Register refused to recognize her qualification.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson via Univ. of London
In 1872, she founded the New Hospital for Women in London staffed entirely by women. Anderson appointed her mentor, Elizabeth Blackwell, as the professor of gynecology.
In 1876 an act was passed permitting women to enter the medical professions in the UK. The “Enabling Act” (39 & 40 Vict. Ch. 41) gave the 19 licensing bodies the option to allow women with foreign medical degrees to take their examinations. This meant that women doctors who had trained abroad could potentially become registered as doctors in Britain, although it did not allow for them to train there. According to the Women’s Museum of Ireland, the act “was not passed on behalf of the few women who wish to obtain medical degrees but on behalf of the many women who wish to place themselves under medical advisers of their own sex.”
In 1883, Anderson was appointed dean of the London School of Medicine for Women, which she had helped to found in 1874, and oversaw its expansion.
A 1900 portrait of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, via Wikipedia
In 1902, Anderson retired to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. In 1908, she became the mayor of the town, the first female mayor in England. She was a member of the suffragette movement and her daughter Louisa was also a prominent suffragette.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died in Aldeburgh on December 17, 1917 at the age of 81, just two months before the Representation of People Act extended the right to vote to women over 30.
Today, 45.5% of registered medical practitioners in the UK are women.
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