Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, LSA MD (9 June 1836 – 17 December 1917), was the first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain, the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first Dean of a British medical school, the first woman M.D. in France, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain. I was delighted to see a tribute to her at the Headquarters of my friend the Lord Ballyedmond, when I visited him for coffee on Monday. 

  It may have been in The Englishwoman’s Journal, first issued in 1858, that Elizabeth first read of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who had become the first female doctor in the United States in 1849. When Dr Blackwell visited London in 1859, Elizabeth travelled to the capital. By then, her sister Louie was married and living in London. Elizabeth joined the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which organized Blackwell’s lectures on “Medicine as a Profession for Ladies” and set up a private meeting between Elizabeth and the doctor. It is said that during a visit to Alde House around 1860, one evening while sitting by the fireside, Elizabeth and Emily Davies selected careers for advancing the frontiers of women’s rights; Elizabeth was to open the medical profession to women, Emily the doors to a university education for women, while 13-year-old Millicent was allocated politics and votes for women. At first her father Newson was opposed to the radical idea of his daughter becoming a doctor but eventually came round and agreed to do all in his power, both financially and otherwise, to support Elizabeth in the long uphill battle

After an initial unsuccessful visit to leading doctors in Harley Street, Elizabeth decided to first spend six months as a hospital nurse at Middlesex Hospital, London, London in 1860. On proving to be a good nurse, she was allowed to attend an outpatients’ clinic, then her first operation. She attempted to enroll in the hospital’s Medical School and was refused but was allowed to attend private tuition in Latin, Greek and materia medica with the hospital’s apothecary, while continuing her work as a nurse. She also employed a tutor to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. Eventually she was allowed into the dissecting room and the chemistry lectures. Gradually, Elizabeth became an unwelcome presence among the male students who in 1861, presented a memorial to the school against her admittance as a fellow student. She was obliged to leave Middlesex Hospital but she did so with an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica. Elizabeth Garrett then applied to several medical schools, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Royal College of Surgeons, all of which refused her admittance.

 Meanwhile, she privately obtained a certificate in anatomy and physiology. In 1862, she was finally admitted for private study by the Society of Apothecaries. During the next three years, she continued her battle to qualify by studying privately with various professors, including some at the University of St Andrews, the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and the London Hospital Medical School. In 1865, she finally took her exam and obtained a licence from the Society of Apothecaries to practise medicine, the first woman qualified in Britain to do so (apart from the woman passing herself off as Dr James Barry). On the day, three out of seven candidates passed the exam, Elizabeth with the highest marks.The Society of Apothecaries immediately amended its regulations to prevent other women obtaining a licence.

Though she was now a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, as a woman, Garrett could not take up a medical post in any hospital. So in late 1865, Elizabeth Garrett L.S.A. opened her own practice at 20 Upper Berkeley Street, London. At first, patients were few but the practice gradually grew. After six months in practice, Elizabeth wished to open an outpatients dispensary, to enable poor women to obtain medical help from a qualified practitioner of their own gender. In 1865, there was outbreak of cholera in Britain, affecting both rich and poor, and in their panic, some people forgot any prejudices they had in relation to a female doctor. The first death due to cholera occurred in 1866, but by then Elizabeth had already opened St. Mary’s Dispensary for Women and Children, at 69 Seymour Place. In the first year, she tended to 3,000 new patients, who made 9,300 outpatient visits to the dispensary. On hearing that the Dean of the faculty of medicine at the Sorbonne University, Paris was in favour of admitting women as medical students, Elizabeth studied French so that she could apply for a medical degree, which she obtained in 1870.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, M.D

The same year she was elected to the first London School Board, an office newly opened to women; Elizabeth’s was the highest vote among all the candidates. Also in that year, she was made one of the visiting physicians of the East London Hospital for Children, becoming the first woman in Britain to be appointed to a medical post, but she found the duties of these two positions to be incompatible with her principal work in her private practice and the dispensary, as well as her role as a new mother, so she resigned from these posts by 1873. In 1872, the dispensary became the New Hospital for Women and Children, treating women from all over London for gynaecological conditions; the hospital moved to new premises in Marleybone Street in 1874. Around this time, Elizabeth also entered into discussion with male medical views regarding women. In 1874, Dr. Henry Maudsley’s article on Sex and Mind in Education, which argued that education for women caused over-exertion and thus, reduced their reproductive capacity, sometimes causing “nervous and even mental disorders”.

 Elizabeth’s counter-argument was that the real danger for women was not education but boredom and that fresh air and exercise were preferable to sitting by the fire with a novel. In the same year, she co-founded London School of Medicine for Women with Sophie Jex-Blake and became a lecturer in what was the only teaching hospital in Britain to offer courses for women. She continued to work there for the rest of her career and was as dean of the school from 1883 to 1902. This school was later called the Royal Free Hospital of Medicine, which later became part of what is now the medical school of University College,London. In 1873 she had gained membership of the British Medical Association and remained the only woman member for 19 years, due to the Association’s vote against the admission of further women – “one of several instances where Garrett, uniquely, was able to enter a hitherto all male medical institution which subsequently moved formally to exclude any women who might seek to follow her.” In 1897 Dr Garrett Anderson was elected president of the East Anglian branch of the British Medical Association.

In 1873 she gained membership of the British Medical Association and remained the only woman member for 19 years, due to the Association’s vote against the admission of further women – “one of several instances where Garrett, uniquely, was able to enter a hitherto all male medical institution which subsequently moved formally to exclude any women who might seek to follow her.”

Elizabeth worked steadily at the development of the New Hospital for Women, and (from 1874) at the creation of the London School of Medicine for Women. Both institutions have since been handsomely and suitably housed and equipped, the New hospital for Women (in the Euston Road) for many years being worked entirely by medical women, and the schools (in Hunter Street, WC1) having over 200 students, most of them preparing for the medical degree of London University (the present-day University College London), which was opened to women in 1877. In 1897 Dr Garrett Anderson was elected president of the East Anglian branch of the British Medical Association.

On 9 November 1908 she was elected Mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in England. She died in 1917 and is buried in Aldeburgh.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was also active in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1866, Anderson and Davies presented petitions signed by more than 1,500 asking that women heads of household be given the vote. She was not as active as her sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, though Anderson became a member of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1889. After her husband’s death in 1907, she became more active. As mayor of Aldeburgh, she gave speeches for suffrage, before the increasing militant activity in the movement led to her withdrawal. Her daughter Louisa, also a physician, was more active and more militant, spending time in prison in 1912 for her suffrage activities.

Elizabeth Garret Anderson once remarked that “a doctor leads two lives, the professional and the private, and the boundaries between the two are never traversed”. In 1871, she married  James George Skelton Anderson (d. 1907) of the Orient Steamship Company co-owned by his uncle Arthur Anderson, but she did not give up her medical practice. She had three children, Louisa (1873-1943), Margaret (1874-1875), who died of meningitis, and Alan (1877-1952). Louisa also became a pioneering doctor of medicine and feminist activist. They retired to Aldeburgh in 1902  and moved to Alde House in 1903, after the death of Elizabeth’s mother. Skelton died of stroke in 1907. She enjoyed a happy marriage and in later life, devoted time to Alde House and gardening, travelling with younger members of the extended family.

The New Hospital for Women was renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in 1918 and amalgamated with the Obstetric Hospital in 2001 to form the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital  before relocating to become the University College Hospital Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing at UCH.

The former Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital buildings are being incorporated into the design and structure of the new National Headquarters for the public service trade union UNISON.

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery, a permanent installation set within the restored former Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital building that now forms part of the new UNISON Centre, uses a variety of media to set the story of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, her hospital, and women’s struggle to achieve equality in the field of medicine within the wider framework of 19th and 20th century social history.

There is a secondary school in Islington, London which is named after her: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Language College For Girls. So I dedicate this article to my friend Sofina Ziu of Milwaukie, Wisconsin, USA..