Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: The Loophole She Walked Through
Every British medical school she applied to said no — Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, the Royal College of Surgeons. So she read the charter of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and found that it contained no clause permitting them to refuse a woman. On 28 September 1865 she collected her licence, having scored the highest marks of the three candidates who passed. The Society changed its rules immediately afterwards, and the door she had opened was shut behind her.
Snape and Blackheath
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel on 9 June 1836, the second of eleven children of Newson Garrett, a Suffolk entrepreneur who built a substantial barley and coal business and, from 1846, the maltings at Snape. Her mother was Louisa Dunnell. The family produced more than one insurgent: her younger sister Millicent Garrett Fawcett became the leader of Britain's constitutional women's suffrage movement.
From thirteen she attended a boarding school for ladies in Blackheath, and complained afterwards of the lack of science and mathematics. In 1854 she met Emily Davies, who became a lifelong confidante; family lore holds that the two of them, with the thirteen-year-old Millicent listening, divided the work between them — Garrett would open medicine to women, Davies the universities, and Millicent would take the vote.
The decisive encounter came in 1859, when the American physician Elizabeth Blackwell lectured in London on "Medicine as a Profession for Ladies." Garrett went to hear her. Her own father's first reaction to the ambition was that it was so disgusting he could not entertain it for a moment. He came round, and paid.
Six Months at the Middlesex
From August 1860 she worked as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital, gradually talking her way into clinics and operations. She studied Latin, Greek and pharmacology privately, and took anatomy and physiology with tutors three evenings a week. She earned an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica — and in 1861 the male students presented a memorial against her admission, and she was made to leave.
The rejections that followed were universal. Then came the Apothecaries. In 1862, holding a private certificate in anatomy and physiology, she was admitted for examination; the Society had no legal ground for exclusion. Three of the seven candidates passed in 1865 and she topped them. She became the first woman openly qualified as a physician in Britain, LSA after her name. The regulations were amended at once, closing the route for Sophia Jex-Blake, who was attempting the same manoeuvre behind her.
The Dispensary
She opened a private practice at 20 Upper Berkeley Street late in 1865. The larger project began the following year at 69 Seymour Place: St Mary's Dispensary for Women and Children, built on the plain observation that poor women in London would rather not be examined by men and were therefore not being examined at all. In its first year she saw 3,000 new patients across 9,300 outpatient visits.
The licence still was not a degree. Since no British university would grant her one, she learned French and took her MD at the University of Paris in 1870.
That was a crowded year. She was elected to the first London School Board, topping the poll of all candidates, and became the first woman appointed to a medical post in Britain, as visiting physician at the East London Hospital for Children. By 1873 she had given both up: the private practice, the dispensary and small children were more than the days would hold. She had married James George Skelton Anderson of the Orient Steam Navigation Company on 9 June 1871. Their daughter Louisa, born 1873, became a pioneering surgeon and suffragist; Margaret died of meningitis in infancy; Alan was born in 1877.
In 1872 the dispensary became the New Hospital for Women and Children, moving in 1874 to larger premises and treating gynaecological conditions from across London. In 1874, with Jex-Blake, she co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women — the first British institution to train women as doctors — and served as its dean from 1883 to 1902. It eventually held over 200 students preparing for London University degrees, which were opened to women in 1877, and it survives today inside UCL Medical School.
The BMA, and Aldeburgh
She joined the British Medical Association in 1873. In 1878, after her election and that of Frances Hoggan, a motion was moved to exclude women; Dr Norman Kerr opposed it on the ground that members had equal rights, but the association shut women out for years afterwards. Anderson campaigned with Sarah Gray and Eliza Walker Dunbar until readmission was won at the Nottingham meeting in 1892. In 1897 she was elected president of the association's East Anglian branch.
Her suffrage work ran alongside all of it. In 1866 she and Emily Davies presented petitions carrying over 1,500 signatures demanding the vote for women heads of household, and she joined the first British women's suffrage committee that year, later sitting on the National Society's central committee from 1889. She withdrew in 1911, unwilling to follow the militant turn — though her daughter Louisa went to prison for it in 1912.
The Andersons retired to Aldeburgh in 1902. Skelton died of a stroke in 1907. On 9 November 1908 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was elected mayor of Aldeburgh: the first woman mayor in England, holding an office her father had held in 1889, at a time when she could not vote in a parliamentary election.
Why Elizabeth Is Called a Genius
Her gift was strategic rather than scientific. Anderson made no discovery, published no finding that changed medicine, and would not have claimed otherwise. What she had was an unusually cold and accurate reading of institutions — the ability to look at a wall of prohibitions and identify the one seam in it. The Apothecaries' charter had no sex bar because nobody had thought it necessary to write one; she noticed, obtained exactly the private certificate that would qualify her for examination, and sat it. That is legal and tactical intelligence of a high order, deployed against a profession with every advantage of custom and law.
The second quality is more usual and no less demanding: she could absorb humiliation without losing the thread. Six months at the Middlesex ended in a student petition against her. Every medical school in Britain refused her. She took a Paris degree because London would not give her one, and when the Society of Apothecaries slammed the door she had opened, she did not stop at her own qualification but built the institutions — a dispensary, a hospital, a medical school with a deanship she held for nineteen years — that made her achievement reproducible instead of singular. The counter-case is worth stating plainly: she was wealthy, her father financed her, and she had powerful allies in Davies and Blackwell, advantages Jex-Blake and others lacked. But the wall she went through was real, and she is the one who found the way.
Legacy
Anderson died on 17 December 1917 and is buried at Aldeburgh. The New Hospital for Women was renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in 1918; it merged into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital at University College Hospital in 2001. Her papers are at the Women's Library at the LSE, and her name is on a school in Islington, a centre at Ipswich Hospital, and a building at Worcester. She was the first woman to qualify as a physician in Britain, the first to sit on an English school board, and the first to be mayor of an English town — and she achieved the last of these a decade before any woman could vote for her.
Achievements
- Held posts at London School of Medicine for Women and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital
- Fields: female prostitute and local politics
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