In 1865 Britain was astir with a great controversy: a medical man called Dr James Barry was found upon his death to be a woman called Margaret Anne Bulkley. Margaret had been so desperate to practice medicine that she went to extraordinary lengths to hide her identity, deceiving almost everyone for 56 years. Going under the name of James Barry, she applied to the Edinburgh Medical School in 1809, to train to become a doctor because they would not accept women. She was nearly turned down because the board thought this applicant was a pre-pubescent boy whose voice had not broken. However, she was accepted and qualified as a doctor in 1812, passing her exam at the Royal College of Surgeons the next year. The same year that James Barry’s secret came to light in 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified as Britain’s first woman medical doctor.
After the disturbance concerning James Barry had died down, the discussion about women doctors grew. After all, the English woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, had become America’s first qualified medical doctor in 1849, and she had successfully pioneered the New York Infirmary for Women and Children with her sister Emily in 1857. Elizabeth grew up as a cultural Episcopalian Christian, moved to the Quaker denomination, then slipped away into the Unitarian Church for a while, before coming full circle back to her Episcopalian roots as a committed Christian.
On her return to England, Elizabeth Blackwell practiced as a doctor and supported Sophia Jex-Blake who led the charge of the “Edinburgh Seven” to petition the government for women to be allowed to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. These seven women became the first to study at a British university, in 1869. However, they were not allowed to practice as doctors until the UK Medical Act of 1876.
Jex-Blake was overjoyed and wrote to her friend, Lucy Sewell: “It is a grand thing to enter the very first British University ever opened to women, isn’t it?” Jex-Blake went on to pioneer the first college for training women in medicine in 1886, called the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, but it closed in 1898 because of her ultra-disciplinarian approach. However, one of her pupils, called Elsie Inglis (1864-1917), was destined to develop a model that would last.
In 1889, Elsie Inglis co-founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women, with the support of her father, John Inglis, and their friend Sir William Muir, the Principal of the University of Edinburgh. All three were evangelical Christians. The college began in 30 Chambers St, opposite the National Museum in Edinburgh, and it eventually merged with the School of Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Edinburgh in 1916. The original building of Elsie’s college was demolished in 1927 and a new building was erected as the Edinburgh Dental Hospital and College, also pioneered by Christians.
Elsie went on to become a successful surgeon and became the founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Services in 1914. By the end of World War I, her team had established 14 medical units with women doctors, nurses and staff, in Corsica, France, Malta, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia. It has been estimated that through Elsie’s women staff, hundreds of thousands of people were saved during the war. The people of Serbia are especially grateful to her, with Denis Keefe, the UK ambassador to that country, stating, “In Scotland she became a doctor; in Serbia she became a saint.”
At her funeral in St Giles’ in Edinburgh, the Dean of the Thistle Chapel celebrated her life of service, saying “… her name is linked forever with the great souls who have led the van of womanly service for God and man.”
“Heal the sick…” (Matthew 10:8, NKJV).
Image: Elsie Inglis, photo by Lady Frances Balfour, CC BY 4.0 httpscreativecommons.orglicenses by 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons