Clockwise from left: Sophia Jex-Blake was a pioneer; the London School of Medicine, which she founded in 1874; suffragettes marching in support of women studying medicine; Dr Elizabeth Blackwell.
ACCEPTANCE AT LAST Reaching the late 18th and early 19th centuries, focus shifts from practising medicine to qualifying as doctors. Like Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Blackwell qualified abroad, in America – having first been rejected by 29 medical schools there. She later became the first British woman doctor to be officially registered, in 1859. Women were finally able to earn a medical degree from a British university – the University of London – in 1882, although the battle to study on an equal footing to men would go on. Remarkably it was not until 1947 that all London medical schools were obliged to take women students. In the meantime, women were finally allowed to become members of the RCP in 1909 and fellows in 1925. In 1934, Helen Mackay was the first woman to be elected FRCP; in 1943, Janet Vaughan became the first to be elected to the RCP Council; and in 1989, Margaret Turner-Warwick, a leading chest physician, was elected as the RCP’s first woman president.
By 1972, 20 per cent
“This was not so much a glass ceiling as a steel door”
of practising doctors in Britain were women. Today – 150 years after Sophia Jex-Blake was pelted with mud – that figure is nearer 50 per cent. The exhibition offers a comprehensive picture of the last 500 years, and
to bring things fully up-to-date, the curators decided to ask today’s women doctors to choose something to put on display to represent their careers. One chose an iPhone because “the only way you can manage to be a mother and a doctor is to have all of these different apps”. Coupled with the fact that, for the duration of the
exhibition, the portraits of venerable male physicians in the RCP’s Osler Room have been replaced by portraits of equally venerable women, it might well be an indication that “this vexed question” has finally been put to bed.
Adam Campbell is a freelance writer and regular contributor to MDDUS publications
This vexed question: 500 years of women in medicine can be visited at the Royal College of Physicians Museum at St Andrews Place, London, until 18 January, Monday to Friday, 9am–5pm. Admission is free.
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