London School of Medicine for Women
Training Female Doctors in the Late Nineteenth Century
By Dr Mary Chapman
The London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW) was founded in October 1874 by an association of women known as the Edinburgh Seven, having unsuccessfully fought to study medicine at the university there (see Women for Women: Sophia Jex-Blake). The LSMW was the first (and for many years, the only) medical school in Britain to accept women students and was established in response to the extreme difficulty women faced in obtaining a medical education at any existing schools.
The LSMW took premises in the heart of Bloomsbury at 30 Henrietta Street on Brunswick Square. The first council and board of trustees were made up of leading medical and scientific thinkers of the age, both male and female. The council included two of the very first women to qualify as doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (who later became Dean of the School), alongside renowned evolutionary biologist Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, and neurologist Dr John Hughlings Jackson. Several members of the council, including Garrett Anderson, also taught courses at the School.[i]
The School itself only taught the theoretical portion of the medical curriculum, having no attached clinical institution. This was a significant barrier to women receiving a full medical education. After an initial struggle, in 1877 the School succeeded in securing clinical instruction for its students at the Royal Free Hospital on nearby Gray’s Inn Road. As the LSMW expanded, it moved to new premises on Hunter Street, became part of the University of London, and consolidated its relationship with the Royal Free Hospital, becoming the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women in 1896.
During the early years of the School, women had also successfully campaigned for the right to attend the medical examinations which, taken after the course of study, enabled students to qualify and practice as medical doctors. Barred from the institutions where these examinations were offered, aspiring female doctors were initially hamstrung in their career ambitions, despite the LSMW now providing the opportunity for a medical education. However, following legislative reform, in 1877 the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland allowed women entry. By 1889, the LSMW prospectus listed 7 Medical Examining Boards open to women, including the University of London and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.[ii] These changes opened women’s access to the medical profession and the number of medical women greatly increased over the following decades. In 1881 there were only 25 women doctors qualified in Britain, but by 1911 there were 495- many of whom graduated from the LSMW.[iii]
In the late nineteenth century, life at the LSMW was busy and varied. The course of study offered by the School was mentally rigorous, meeting the standards needed for the registrable diploma. To enter the LSMW, students had to take a preliminary examination in ‘cultured’ subjects like literature and maths, complete an application form alongside a letter of support attesting to their character and fitness for the course, and pay their fees for entry (in 1889, this totalled £105 plus extra costs for examinations and supplementary courses).[iv] Students who were admitted to the school would then be taught the full medical curriculum, attending the same classes which their male counterparts did in the public medical schools around the country (and indeed often being taught by the same teachers).
In the School’s opening year, students could take classes in anatomy and comparative anatomy, physiology and practical physiology, chemistry, botany, materia medica, the practice of medicine, midwifery, forensic medicine, pathology, and surgery and ophthalmic surgery. In 1975, mental pathology was added to the syllabus and, in 1876, a course on the diseases of women.[v] Hospital instruction at the Royal Free included lectures on clinical medicine and clinical surgery. Lectures were given fortnightly by each of the four senior members of the hospital staff, two on clinical surgery and two on clinical medicine in alternate weeks. Alongside these lectures, demonstrations were held on auscultation and physical signs, pathology, the administration of anaesthetics, and surgery. Students also learnt ward work and practical pharmacy.[vi] Students could take the whole course to qualify as an MD, or they could select a specific strand, taking only the classes needed to qualify in their area of practice. This suited those women who, for example, intended to work as midwives.
In addition to its demanding course of study, the LSMW also offered its students a robust social life. The LSMW ran sports teams (which competed with their male counterparts), had a Students’ Room for the women to socialise in, and organised seasonal events for its students to come together and celebrate. At the Christmas party in 1900, the School was transformed into ‘gala dress.’[vii] Writing of the festivities, student Alice Sorabji described how the ‘laboratories were marvellously transformed into the most enchanting bowers- holly and evergreens were to be seen everywhere, the bannisters were decked with Chinese lanterns and lights […] and even certain gas cupboards were beautified and made to look attractive.’[viii] The students put on a production of Alice in Wonderland in the physics laboratory and had supper in the biology rooms. Sorabji reported that ‘everybody seemed to enjoy it thoroughly’;[ix] the ‘refreshments were superb’ and ‘dancing went on vigorously for a long time.’[x]
The School also had its own periodical, the Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women, which published plenty of content designed to foster a sense of friendliness and community amongst its readership, promoting ‘fellow feeling among the different sections of our School’ and linking together ‘past and present students.’[xi] That many of the periodical’s readers did find community in the Magazine is evidenced by the endearments which pepper the letters sent to the editor. As one reader writes, the ‘opportunity of meeting with and hearing of old chums and fellow-students, new and old, in the pages of the magazine’ is a ‘very great and real pleasure.’[xii] This strong sense of community was important, as LSMW graduates still faced marginalisation in their professional lives. At the turn of the twentieth century not all institutions were willing to hire female doctors and those that did often restricted them to junior roles, treating female patients only. Many medial women practised in isolation amongst male colleagues, or in far flung parts of the British Empire (although some created their own institutions at home: hospitals for women, run by women (see Women for Women: Medical Women and Female Patients in the 1890s).
The LSMW provided a locus for alumni as well as students, and several graduates of the School who practised locally returned as teachers. A notable example is Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake, who graduated from the School in 1894, and later became the first woman to obtain a Master of Surgery. She was renowned for her skill and pioneering technique in abdominal surgery, specialising particularly in the treatment of cervical and rectal cancer. Aldrich-Blake went on to become lead surgeon at the Bloomsbury-based New Hospital for Women & Children, also working at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1895, she became the first woman to hold the post of surgical registrar there and was promoted to full surgeon in 1902 and consulting surgeon in 1910.[xiii] Aldrich-Blake taught students at the LSMW, later taking on the role of Vice-Dean of the School in 1906, and Dean in 1914. Her ‘main object was to improve the technical education of the students.’[xiv] One of the School’s earliest graduates, Edith Shove, also worked as a demonstrator in anatomy at the LSMW before she was able to obtain her MB (she completed her course of study in 1879). Shove went on to become the medical offer to the female staff of the Post Office in 1883 and was the first female doctor to be appointed to a public post.
For the nineteenth century, the LSMW remained the focal point of medical women’s training in Britain. Although the Edinburgh and Glasgow Schools of Medicine for Women opened in 1886 and 1890 respectively, it was not until the early 1900s that women were accepted into public medical schools alongside men. Even then, it was only a select number of Scottish, Irish, and provincial English schools which allowed women entry before the Great War. Until the 1930s, the LSMW still trained around a quarter of all female medical graduates in the Britain.[xv] The School was therefore central to the sense of community and professional identity which early female doctors held and played a significant role in shaping women’s medical practice for several decades. The London School of Medicine for Women was a pioneering institution and played a key role in female emancipation in Britain. Its position in Bloomsbury, well connected to nearby hospitals and learned institutions, and with many of the staff of these institutions on the faculty, was a boon for the campaign for women’s integration into the medical profession.
Bibliography
Anon., ‘Obituary: Louisa Aldrich Blake, D.B.E., M.D., M.S.’, British Medical Journal, 1:69 (9 Jan 1926)
Elston, Mary Ann C., ‘Women Doctors in the British Health Service: A Sociological Study of Their Careers and Opportunities’, PhD Thesis (University of Leeds, 1986
Jefferson, Laura, Karen Bloor, and Alan Maynard, ‘Women in medicine: historical perspectives and recent trends’, British Medical Bulletin, 114:1 (June 2015), 5–15
Riddell, Lord, Dame Louisa Aldrich Blake (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926)
London School of Medicine for Women Archive. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM
Dr Mary Chapman is Alan F Price Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Dr Chapman’s research focuses on the periodical press and medical practice during the Victorian period. Her work centres on women in medicine, as both practitioners and patients. She has published on perceptions of the female mind in the Victorian press (Victorian Periodicals Review, 2020), and on medical women’s magazines (Humanities, forthcoming 2024).
[i] London School of Medicine for Women Prospectus, 1874. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/01/01/001
[ii] London School of Medicine for Women Prospectus, 1889. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/01/01/001
[iii] Laura Jefferson, Karen Bloor, and Alan Maynard, ‘Women in medicine: historical perspectives and recent trends’, British Medical Bulletin, 114:1 (June 2015), 5–15, p.7
[iv] London School of Medicine for Women Prospectus, 1889. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/01/01/001
[v] London School of Medicine for Women Prospectuses, 1874-1876. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/01/01/001
[vi] London School of Medicine for Women Prospectus, 1889. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/01/01/001
[vii] Alice Sorabji, ‘The Christmas Party’, Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women, 15 (1900), 599-601, p.599. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/03/07/002
[viii] Sorabji, p.599
[ix] Sorabji, p.601
[x] Sorabji, p.600
[xi] Anon, ‘Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women and Royal Free Hospital’, Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women, 1 (1895), 3-4, p.4. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/03/07/001
[xii] Correspondence from anon. to editor, Magazine of the London School of Medicine for Women, 2 (1895), p.86. London Metropolitan Archives, H72/SM/C/03/07/001
[xiii] Anon., ‘Obituary: Louisa Aldrich Blake, D.B.E., M.D., M.S.’, British Medical Journal, 1:69 (9 Jan 1926), doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.3393.69
[xiv] Lord Riddell, Dame Louisa Aldrich Blake (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), p.46
[xv] See further, Mary Ann C. Elston, ‘Women Doctors in the British Health Service: A Sociological Study of Their Careers and Opportunities’, PhD Thesis (University of Leeds, 1986)