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“Fascinating Scalpel-wielders and Fair Dissectors”: Women's Experience of Irish Medical Education, c. 1880s–1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Laura Kelly
Laura Kelly
Affiliation:
Laura Kelly, BA, MLitt, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland; e-mail: kelly.laurae@gmail.com
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Information
Medical History , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 495 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Ode to the lady medicals in ‘Girl Graduates Chat’ section, St. Stephen's, March 1902, 1 (5): 93.

2 Those arguing against women in medicine at the time claimed that women's physical, emotional and moral natures made them unfit to be doctors. See, for example, ‘A lady on lady doctors’, Lancet, 7 May 1870, i: 680. For literature on women's entry to the medical profession, see Catriona Blake, The charge of the parasols: women's entry to the medical profession, London, Women's Press, 1994, and Thomas Neville Bonner, To the ends of the earth: women's search for education in medicine, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992.

3 Letter to the Editor, Freeman's Journal, 2 Feb. 1871, p. 3.

4 Freeman's Journal, 9 Aug. 1888, p. 4.

5 Clara Cullen, ‘The Museum of Irish Industry, Robert Kane and education for all in the Dublin of the 1850s and 1860s’, Hist. Ed., 2009, 38 (1): 99–113, p. 106.

6 Ibid., p. 107.

7 Ibid., p. 109.

8 Brian B Kelham, ‘The Royal College of Science for Ireland (1867–1926)’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 1967, 56 (223): 297–309, p. 300.

9 Letter to the Editor, Freeman's Journal, 28 Jan. 1870, p. 4.

10 Royal College of Physicians in Ireland Archive, Summary of the income and expenditure of the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland, for half year, ended October 17, 1874, Minutes of the KQCPI, vol. 16, p. 34.

11 Author's calculations based on the matriculation records of Irish universities, research in progress.

12 Daily Graphic, 23 Sept. 1914, in Royal Free Hospital Archives Scrapbooks.

13 Queen, 27 Feb. 1915, in Royal Free Hospital Archives Scrapbooks.

14 ‘Women doctors’, Irish Times, 23 Nov. 1921, p. 4.

15 Keir Waddington, ‘Mayhem and medical students: image, conduct and control in the Victorian and Edwardian London teaching hospital’, Soc. Hist. Med., 2002, 15: 45–64, p. 45.

16 Carol Dyhouse, ‘Driving ambitions: women in pursuit of a medical education, 1890–1939’, Women's Hist. Rev., 1998, 7: 321–43, p. 322.

17 Barbara Brookes has used the unique source of Agnes Bennett's letters in order to gain an insight into the lives of women medical graduates of the University of Edinburgh, see Barbara Brookes, ‘A corresponding community: Dr Agnes Bennett and her friends from the Edinburgh Medical College for Women of the 1890s’, Med. Hist., 2008, 52: 237–56.

18 Historians such as Andrew Warwick have attempted to gain an insight into student experience through studying the curriculum, see Andrew Warwick, Masters of theory: Cambridge and the rise of mathematical physics, University of Chicago Press, 2003.

19 For example, the Belfast Medical Students Society Minute books.

20 Janet Browne, ‘Squibs and snobs: science in humorous British undergraduate magazines around 1830’, Hist. Sci., June 1992, 30: 165–97, p. 167.

21 These were succeeded by U.C.G.: A College Annual and Quarryman.

22 Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, ‘The position of women’, St. Stephen's, June 1903, 1 (12): 252–3.

23 ‘Medicine’, Q.C.G., Feb. 1907, 5 (2), p. 50; ‘My impressions of the lady students by X.Y.Z.’, UCG: A College Annual, Easter 1913, 1 (1): 33.

24 ‘How Lill got her M.D.’, Quarryman, March, 1917, 4 (5): 101.

25 Ibid.

26 For instance, one writer for U.c. G. claimed: “It is a great pity that more of the gentler sex do not enter the portals of the magic studio of ‘The First of Arts, without whose light, all others would fade into the night’. Do they not hear the cries of the sick little children as St. Patrick heard the children of the Gael?”, ‘Medical Notes’, U.C.G.: A College Annual, 1919–20: 57.

27 Male medical students were allegedly notorious for rowdy behaviour, as outlined by Thomas Neville Bonner in Becoming a physician: medical education in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States, 1750–1945, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 215, and M Jeanne Peterson, The medical profession in mid-Victorian London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1978, p. 40. Bonner argues that male medical students were characterized as being drunken, immature and irreverent, an image which persisted well into the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

28 ‘Cherchez la femme’, Q.C.C., Dec. 1908, 5 (1): 19.

29 ‘Winsome women at Q.C.B. (with apologies to no-one)’, Q.C.B., 20 Jan. 1905, 6 (3): 7.

30 Ibid.

31 One writer to the Lancet, for example, claimed that a female doctor's career in medicine would have negative consequences for her husband and children. ‘A lady on lady doctors’, Lancet, 1870, i: 680.

32 Robert Wilson, Aesculapia vitrix, London, Chapman and Hall, 1886, p. 28.

33 Details from Joyce Darling, daughter of Olive Pedlow.

34 Approximately 40 per cent of Irish women medical students matriculating between 1885 and 1922 did not succeed in graduating with a medical degree. (Author's own calculations.)

35 ‘Medicine’, Q.C.G., Nov. 1904, 3 (1): 16.

36 Mary Ryan was the first female professor to be appointed to an Irish university. She was made professor of Romance languages at Queen's College Cork in 1910.

37 Leone McGregor Hellstedt (ed.), Women physicians of the world: autobiographies of medical pioneers, Washington, DC, and London, Medical Women's International Federation, Hemisphere, 1978, p. 93.

38 John Cowell, A noontide blazing: Brigid Lyons Thornton: rebel, soldier, doctor, Blackrock, Currach Press, 2005, p. 44.

39 Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, and Bachelor of Art of Obstetrics.

40 ‘Medical Students’ Association’, Q.C.B., 12 Feb. 1900, 1 (3): 11.

41 Typed memoirs of Emily Winifred Dickson (private collection of Niall Martin).

42 ‘Winsome women at Q.C.B. (with apologies to nobody)’, Q.C.B., 20 Jan. 1905, 6 (4): 7.

43 Humphry Rolleston, ‘An address on the problem of success for medical women’, Br. Med. J., 6 Oct. 1923, ii: 591–4.

44 Richard H Hunter, ‘A history of the Ulster medical society’, Ulster Med. J., 1936, 5: 178–95, p. 168.

45 Henry Bewley, ‘Medical education: a criticism and a scheme’, Dub. J. Med. Sci., 1910, 129: 81–97, p. 82.

46 H Nelson Hardy, The state of the medical profession in Great Britain and Ireland in 1900, Dublin, Fannin, 1901, p. 61.

47 William Dale, The state of the medical profession in Great Britain and Ireland, being the successful Carmichael prize essay in 1873, Dublin, J Atkinson, 1875.

48 E D Mapother, MD, ‘The medical profession and its work’, Dub. J. Med. Sci., 1886, 82: 177–206, pp. 193–4.

49 L S Jacyna, ‘The laboratory and the clinic: the impact of pathology on surgical diagnosis in the Glasgow Western Infirmary, 1875–1910’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1988, 62: 384–406, p. 405.

50 Royal Commission on University Education in Ireland, Final report of the commissioners, 1903, p. 8.

51 For example, at the University of Glasgow, women were unable to apply for bursaries when they were first admitted to the medical school. And, in later years, women were restricted with regard to the bursaries they could apply for. Wendy Alexander, First ladies of medicine, University of Glasgow, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1987, p. 19.

52 ‘Medical honours to ladies’, Dublin Medical Press, 8 June 1887: 552.

53 ‘Girl graduates chat’, St. Stephen's, Dec. 1901, 2 (1): 50; St. Stephen's, Dec. 1905, 2 (8): 182.

54 ‘Medicine’, Q.C.G., Nov. 1902, 1 (1): 6.

55 ‘Medicine’, Q.C.G., Nov. 1905, 4 (1): 23.

56 ‘From the ladies’ colleges’, St. Stephen's, Nov. 1904, 2 (5): 111.

57 Ella Ovenden, ‘Medicine’, Myrrha Bradshaw (ed.), Open doors for Irishwomen: a guide to the professions open to educated women in Ireland, Dublin, Irish Central Bureau for the Employment of Women, 1907, p. 35.

58 Ethel Lamport, ‘Medicine as a profession’, Education and professions, Women's Library Series, vol. 1, London, Chapman & Hall, 1903, p. 261.

59 Anne Digby, The evolution of British general practice, 1850–1948, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 153.

60 Clara L Williams, ‘A short account of the school of medicine for men and women, RCSI’, Magazine of the LSMW and RFH, Jan. 1896, No. 3: 91–132, p. 104.

61 Ibid., p. 105.

62 ‘Medical advertising by ladies’, Medical Press and Circular (Dublin), 1 April 1896: 358.

63 ‘Women medicals’, Irish Times, 3 March 1922, p. 4.

64 ‘Women medical students: barred by London hospital: attitude of Irish schools’, Irish Times, 3 March 1922, p. 6.

65 The co-education of men and women had often been a problem for opponents of women in higher education. Late-nineteenth-century women physicians failed to share this concern. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, ‘The female animal: medical and biological views of woman and her role in nineteenth-century America’, J. Am. Hist., Sept. 1973, 60: 332–56, p. 342.

66 Florence Stewart Memoirs, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D3612/3/1.

67 Williams, op. cit., note 60 above, p. 109.

68 Ibid.

69 M Anne Crowther and Marguerite W Dupree, Medical lives in the age of surgical revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 157.

70 T Percy C Kirkpatrick, The history of Doctor Steevens’ Hospital Dublin, 1720–1920, Dublin, University Press, Ponsonby and Gibbs, 1924, p. 261.

71 Irish Times, 31 Oct. 1870, p. 4.

72 Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical women: two essays, Edinburgh, William Oliphant, 1872, p. 143.

73 Ibid., p. 143.

74 Staff report dated 10 Sept. 1889, Royal Victoria Hospital Medical Staff Reports, 1881–1899.

75 Royal Victoria Hospital Medical Staff Minutes, 1875–1905, 10 Sept. 1889, p. 205.

76 Staff report dated 15 April 1903, Royal Victoria Hospital Medical Staff Reports, 1899–1936.

77 Letter dated Oct. 1892, signed by twenty-two lecturers from the Dublin teaching hospitals, the King and Queen's College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons (Private collection of Niall Martin).

78 Mary E Daly, ‘An atmosphere of sturdy independence: the state and the Dublin hospitals in the 1930s’, in Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (eds), Medicine, disease and the state in Ireland, 1650–1940, Cork University Press, 1999, pp. 235–6.

79 Richard Clarke, The Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast: a history, 1797–1997, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1997, p. 65.

80 Gearoid Crookes, Dublin's eye and ear: the making of a monument, Dublin, Town House and Country House, 1993, pp. 34–5.

81 ‘Dublin Hospitals Commission Report’, Irish Times, 23 April 1887, p. 5. These Dublin voluntary hospitals later faced another financial crisis in the 1930s, which resulted in the establishment of the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake by the Irish Free State. See Marie Coleman, ‘A terrible danger to the morals of the country: the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake in Great Britain’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 2005, 105: 197–220.

82 Robert F Harrison, ‘Medical education at the Rotunda Hospital 1745–1995’, in Alan Browne (ed.), Masters, midwives and ladies-in-waiting: the Rotunda Hospital, 1745–1995, Dublin, A & A Farmar, 1995, p. 72.

83 Clarke, op. cit., note 79 above, p. 21.

84 Peter Gatenby, Dublin's Meath Hospital: 1753–1996, Dublin, Town House, 1996, p. 73.

85 W Rivington, The medical profession of the United Kingdom, being the essay to which was awarded the first Carmichael prize by the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, 1887, Dublin, Fannin, 1888, p. 658.

86 H Hun, A guide to American medical students in Europe, New York, William Wood, 1883, p. 146.

87 Arthur Ball, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was house-surgeon to Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital and was later appointed Regius Professor of Surgery at Trinity College Dublin. Obituary, ‘Sir Arthur Ball, Bt., M.D., M.Ch.’, Br. Med. J., 5 Jan. 1946, i: 33.

88 Pat Jalland (ed.), Octavia Wilberforce: the autobiography of a pioneer woman doctor, London, Cassell, 1994, p. 101.

89 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Florence Stewart Memoirs, D3612/3/1.

90 Wellcome Library, London, Archives and Manuscripts, Medical Women's Federation Archives, SA/MWF/C.10. The archive consists of letters dated from 1951 from universities and hospitals around Britain (in response to a request from the secretary of the MWF) giving details of the dates of the first women to be admitted for medical study.

91 John Harley Warner and Lawrence J Rizzolo, ‘Anatomical instruction and training for professionalism from the 19th to the 21st centuries’, Clinical Anatomy, 2006, 19: 403–14, p. 404; see also John Harley Warner and James M Edmonson, Dissection: photographs of a rite of passage in American medicine: 1880–1930, New York, Blast Books, 2009.

92 Michael Sappol, A traffic of dead bodies: anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 88–9.

93 Warner and Rizzolo, op. cit., note 91 above, p. 405.

94 A M Cooke, ‘Queen Victoria's medical household’, Med. Hist., 1982, 26: 307–20, p. 308.

95 ‘Lady surgeons’, Br. Med. J., 2 April 1870, i: 338–9, p. 338.

96 Alison Bashford, Purity and pollution: gender, embodiment, and Victorian medicine, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998, p. 112. The Edinburgh male medical students protested on the grounds that women dissecting alongside men signified a “systematic infringement of the laws of decency”.

97 Waddington, op. cit., note 15 above, p. 53; Bashford, op. cit., note 96 above, p. 114.

98 Bashford, op. cit., note 96 above, p. 114.

99 ‘Meeting: Friday May 28th 1897’, Catholic University School of Medicine: Governing Body Minute Book, Vol. 1, 1892–1911 (CU/14).

100 ‘Annual Report of the Faculty: May 20th 1898’, Catholic University School of Medicine: Governing Body Minute Book, Vol. 1, 1892–1911 (CU/14).

101 Ibid.

102 ‘Trinity College and women graduates: address by the provost’, Irish Times, 20 Dec. 1905, p. 8; ‘Ireland: from our own correspondent’, Lancet, 6 Feb. 1937, i: 343.

103 ‘The new schools of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’, Irish Times, 29 Jan. 1892, p. 3. The construction of separate dissecting rooms was not unique to Irish medical schools, which could be seen to have been following international trends. At Oxford University there was a separate dissecting room for women medical students between 1917 and 1937, where women were instructed in anatomy by a female Irish instructor, Dr Alice Chance; A M Cooke, My first 75 years of medicine, London, Royal College of Physicians, 1994 p. 7. At Manchester University one small room was allocated to lady medical students which served as a dissecting room, cloakroom, and a place for lady medicals to take their lunch; Carol Dyhouse, No distinction of sex? Women in British universities, 1870–1939, London, UCL Press, 1995, p. 34. In South Africa, at the Capetown Medical School there existed a separate dissecting room for women students, although women and men medical students attended the same lectures and demonstrations; ‘University of Capetown new medical school’, Br. Med. J., 3 Nov. 1928, ii: 813. At the University of Ontario, men and women medical students were also separated for dissections; C M Godfrey, ‘The origins of medical education of women in Ontario’, Med. Hist., 1973, 17: 89–94, p. 90.

104 Letter from Janie Reynolds to the Members of Council, c. 1907, Queen's College Cork, UC/Council/19/51.

105 Q.C.C., Dec. 1907, 4 (1): 15.

106 Letter from Janie Reynolds, c. 1907, see note 104 above.

107 Julie-Marie Strange, “‘She cried a very little”: death, grief and mourning in working-class culture, c. 1880–1914’, Soc. Hist., 2002, 27: 143–61, pp. 152–4.

108 See A W Bates, “‘Indecent and demoralising representations”: public anatomy museums in mid-Victorian England’, Med. Hist., 2008, 52: 1–22, and idem, ‘Dr. Kahn's museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London’, J. R. Soc. Med., 2006, 99: 618–24.

109 Bates, ‘Indecent and demoralising representations’, op. cit., note 108 above, p. 11.

110 Bates, ‘Dr. Kahn's museum’, op. cit., note 108 above, p. 620.

111 ‘News from the schools: medical school’, T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, 10 Dec. 1904, 10 (179): 166.

112 ‘An Irishwoman's diary’, Irish Times, 21 July 1992, p. 9.

113 See Daragh Smith, Dissecting room ballads from the Dublin schools of medicine fifty years ago, Dublin, Black Cat Press, 1984.

114 ‘For the dissecting room’, Q.C.B., April, 1907, 8 (6): 11.

115 Q.C.B., Feb. 1917, 18 (2):15.

116 In 1904, one writer in T.C.D.: A College Miscellany stated that the presence of the female student in the physiological laboratory produced a “laevo-rotatory action upon the eyes of mere man”; ‘News from the schools: medical school’, T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, Dec. 1904, 10 (179): 166. University staff were also said to be affected. An article in U.C.G. claimed that a young professor was distracted by the lady medicals: “it is said that the closing of his eye in focusing a microscopic object for a certain Medica is a masterpiece of ‘Cupid Ophthalmology”’. ‘Medical Notes’, U.C.G.: A College Annual, 1919–20: 57. Similarly, at Trinity College, the female dissecting room was the “favourite haunt” of one anatomy demonstrator, “who, tired of demonstrating to the mere male, wished to while away a pleasant little interval of an hour or so”; ‘News from the schools: medical school’, T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, 2 Dec. 1905, 11 (196): 156.

117 Q.C.B., Feb. 1917, 18 (2): 15.

118 ‘Girl graduates chat’, St. Stephen's, March 1902, 1 (5): 93.

119 Ibid.

120 ‘Letters to the editor: A long-felt want’, National Student, March 1914, 4 (4): 102.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

123 ‘Consultation with the Sphinx’, Irish Times, 25 April 1914, p. 20.

124 ‘The new schools of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’, Irish Times, 29 Jan. 1892, p. 3.

125 ‘The Medical School’, Q.C.B., Nov. 1900, 2 (1): 9.

126 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus life, New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1987, p. 17.

127 Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and science: women physicians in American medicine, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 123.

128 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘A special chapter for ladies who propose to study medicine’, in C B Keetley, The student's guide to the medical profession, London, Macmillan, 1878, p. 45.

129 Morantz-Sanchez, op. cit., note 127 above, p. 124.

130 This pattern implies that friendships between first-year lady medicals were formed early on, and the same pattern existed for male medical students. In addition, some students, for example, Anne Kelly and Winifred O'Hanlon, who began their studies at Queen's College Galway in the 1917/1918 term, had both attended the same secondary school, suggesting that school friends commonly lived together.

131 Julia Pringle, ‘Coombe Lying-in hospital and Guinness dispensary’, The Women Students’ Medical Magazine, Nov. 1902, 1 (1): 42.

132 C Muriel Scott, ‘Rotunda Hospital’, ibid., p. 44.

133 Medical Staff Minute Book of the Royal Victoria Hospital, 1905–37, Monthly Staff Meeting, 7 May 1912, p. 153.

134 ‘The student in digs’, Q.C.B., May 1907, 8 (7): 15.

135 Cowell, op. cit., note 38 above, p. 43.

136 ‘The student in digs’, Q.C.B., May 1907, 8 (7): 15.

137 Ibid., p. 16.

138 See Gillian McLelland and Diana Hadden, Pioneering women: Riddel Hall and Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ulster Historical Foundation, 2005.

139 Florence Stewart Memoirs, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D3612/3/1.

140 Williams, op. cit., note 60 above, p. 107.

141 For a photograph of the student representative council in which Evelyn Simms is the representative ‘Lady Medical’, see Supplement to Q.C.B., 28 June 1901, 2 (8).

142 ‘Fete news: Medical Students’ Stall’, Q.C.B., Feb. 1907, 7 (4): 14.

143 ‘Editorial’, Q.C.B., Jan. 1915, 16 (3): 3.

144 Belfast Medical Students Association, Minute Book (Internal Committee Meetings), 1899–1925.

145 ‘Medical Students’ Association’, Q.C.B., 12 Feb. 1900, 1 (3): 11.

146 Ibid.

147 Ibid.

148 ‘Medical Students’ Association’, Q.C.B., 25 April 1905, 6 (6): 13–14.

149 Ibid.

150 Belfast Medical Students’ Association Minutes, 1898–1907, 9 March 1905.

151 See, for example, Virginia G Drachman, ‘The limits of progress: the professional lives of women doctors, 1881–1926’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1986, 60: 58–72.