This year for the first time there are more women on the GMC medical register than men. It’s taken a long time. Henry VIII’s 1540 charter for barber surgeons decreed, ‘no carpenter, smith, weaver or women shall practice surgery’. In 1860 the BMJ declared: “It is high time that this unnatural and preposterous attempt to establish a race of feminine doctors should be exploded.”
The profession was outraged because from the beginning of the 19th century women seeking medical training had been knocking on its closed doors. Among the few who found a way to slip inside was Margaret Ann Bulkley. Disguised as a man, she qualified in Edinburgh in 1812. For half a century, as army surgeon James Barry, she lived and worked throughout the empire as a man among men, always fighting to improve conditions for suffering people. In St Helena a court-marshal acquitted her of ‘conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman’. Despite suspicions, it was only after her death that Dr Barry was found to be female and might have gone through a pregnancy.
Born in 1832 in Bristol to a liberal family which emigrated to America, Elizabeth Blackwell was repeatedly rejected by medical schools on the grounds either that women were intellectually inferior or because she would threaten the male hegemony. Eventually a medical school in Geneva, upper New York State, offered a sly evasion: they would admit her if the entire student body agreed. Every student voted in her favour – as a joke. So she joined 150 young men and qualified in 1849. With her sister Emily, who followed her into medicine, she fought for social reform throughout the American Civil War. She founded the New York Infirmary for Women and, when she returned to England, the London School of Medicine for Women.
