MAGNIFICENT SEVEN BLAZED A TRAIL

I read The Magnificent Seven

[May 2020] with great interest. My grandmother Edith Wilkes (pictured left) and great aunt Lillian Wilkes both studied medicine at Edinburgh before and during WW1 when it was still a very frowned upon profession for women.

My great grandfather was a solicitor in Darlington and held strict Victorian values. On completing her formal education, my great aunt – the elder of the two girls – insisted she wanted to study medicine. After a lot of resistance from her father she was finally allowed to study in Edinburgh. When she graduated she married a fellow physician, her cousin John McIntyre.

My grandmother, eight years her junior, also wanted to study medicine, but my great grandfather insisted she study something else instead. She did a degree in fine art and was only then allowed to study as a doctor – also in Edinburgh.

My grandmother's peer group was the first mixed group of male and female students allowed to take part in post-mortem examinations – all that intelligence, yet neither lady could vote until the 1920s. The interest in medicine passed through the generations in my family: Lillian's two sons also became medics, while my aunt became a GP and my mother a nurse. Carol Jackson Bromelow, Kent