F E AT URE HI S T O R Y I


THIS VEXED QUESTION


Adam Campbell on the background to an exhibition celebrating 500 years of women in medicine


T’S hard to imagine a more unpleasant start to an anatomy exam. First, you have to walk the gauntlet of a baying mob – several hundred people throwing mud and refuse at you. Once at the exam hall, you find the front gate barred. Luckily, some supporters smuggle you in through a side door. But no sooner is the examination underway than the door swings open and a live sheep is shoved in, creating further chaos. The so-called Surgeons’ Hall Riot in 1870 was the culmination of months of harassment against the ‘Edinburgh Seven’, female medical students who had matriculated at Edinburgh University. Sophia Jex-Blake and her colleagues were already paying higher fees and arranging their own lectures, but had to put up with doors being slammed in their faces, regular jibes and other aggressive behaviour – and now this. In the riot’s aftermath, a supportive male medical


student wrote to the Scotsman newspaper, castigating the perpetrators. In his letter he referred to the ongoing debate about women becoming doctors as “this vexed question”. What he was referring to was not so much a glass ceiling as a steel door. It’s impossible to know how that correspondent would


have reacted had he been told that 150 years later there would be near parity between the sexes in medicine, as there is today. But he would certainly have been astounded to find his words being used in the title of an exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) celebrating 500 years of women in medicine – to coincide with the College’s 500th anniversary. Not least because the RCP had done so much, in its first 400 years, to exclude women from the formal medical sphere. “We felt Jex-Blake was an important pioneer in the


whole story,” explains Briony Hudson, the exhibition’s curator. “And we thought ‘this vexed question’ was a really good theme to look at in the exhibition, raising debate.”


PROBLEMATIC HISTORY Jex-Blake and her female colleagues never did qualify at Edinburgh, prevented from doing so by the university. She eventually got her MD in Switzerland and then sat the Irish exams with the College of Physicians in Dublin before finally becoming registered in Britain. Doing her part to settle “this vexed question”, Jex-Blake set up the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. It later joined the Royal Free Hospital. “We borrowed her portrait from the Royal Free Hospital and it’s right at the beginning of the exhibition,” says Hudson. It’s the second exhibition this year celebrating the


RCP anniversary. The first was on the life and work of the ground-breaking anatomist William Harvey. It was decided, explains Hudson, to contrast this strong story about a well-known medical man with a more “multi- vocal” consideration of the part played by women over


10 / MDDUS INSIGHT / Q4 2018


the period. “The relationship between the College of Physicians and women has always been rather problematic. The museum team wanted to be very up- front about that and more analytical rather than just being celebratory,” she says. The result is indeed a very broad look at women in medicine over the 500-year period and beyond – and not just doctors, clearly, considering the time frame, but also apothecaries, herbalists, writers of recipes, midwives and more. One of the earliest artefacts in the exhibition is a page from the Leominster Register of Deeds in the 13th century, confirming the existence of two sisters, Solicita and Matilda, who described themselves as doctors. From there, the exhibition traces the persistent, if sometimes fleeting, appearances of women in medicine right up to the present day. It shows how, despite the odds – starting with an Act of Parliament of 1511 preventing women, with a few exceptions, from practising medicine – they persisted and fought, defying the rules, using their connections, or simply bamboozling their way into medicine for centuries, before eventually winning the right to freely study, qualify and register as doctors. So there are women like Alice Leevers, who appeared


before the officers of the RCP in 1586 accused of practising medicine. A repeat offender, Leevers had friends in high places and Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain wrote to the College requesting that she continue practising. Despite claiming that Leevers was “utterly ignorant” in medicine, the College complied. Lady Elizabeth Grey and her sister Alethea Talbot were similarly well connected and in the 17th century they published books sharing their medicinal and chemical knowledge more widely. Between 1653 and 1726, Lady Grey’s A Choice Manuall was republished no fewer than 22 times. A woman who called herself Agnodice – taking her


name from a female figure in Greek mythology who dressed as a man in order to become a doctor – boldly advertised her services as a “woman physician” in the 1680s. Margaret Anne Bulkley went one step further, practising as Dr James Barry and rising to become one of the most senior military medics of the 1800s – her secret only being uncovered after her death. Hudson and the museum team combed the archives


in search of letters, testimonies, portraits and other exhibitable material to tell this story. At Lambeth Palace, she uncovered Elizabeth Moore, one of 12 women licensed to practise medicine by the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, in addition to the RCP, had this power) between 1613 and 1696. According to testimonial letters in support of her 1690 application, she treated consumption, lameness, swooning fits, rickets, toothache and pleurisy. One witness said he had used “no other physician for 25 or 26 years … & with good success”.


Photograph: Wellcome; Royal College of Physicians; Mary Evans; The Royal Free Hospital; The Women’s Library collection, LSE Library (suffragettes)


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