Female trailblazers who shook medicine

Women In White Coats: How The First Women Doctors Changed The World Of Medicine Olivia Campbell Swift Press €19 ★★★★★

The journalist Olivia Campbell begins this spirited transatlantic group biography by undermining her own subtitle. Elizabeth Blackwell, right, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake were not really the first women to practise medicine in the UK or the US, but this didn’t make their quest any easier. On the contrary, a long legacy of discrimination against female healers and herbalists, once burned at the stake, meant that this trio of otherwise privileged Victorians had a daunting battle on their hands.

While no one accused them of witchcraft, they were repeatedly denied degrees, jeered at in lecture halls and mocked by the likes of the BritishMedicalJournal.

In Edinburgh in 1870, male medical students rioted over the admittance of women, hurling mud and rotten eggs along with misappropriated medical terms. Fortunately, though very different in character and motivation, Campbell’s heroines shared a single trait: dogged determination.

Central to the misogyny they faced was the loopy, repressive Victorian conviction that the whims of the uterus governed every aspect of womanhood, from physical ability to personality and intellect.

In fact, Campbell notes, uterine illnesses were often the result of malnutrition, perpetual pregnancy and appalling working conditions. Quackery and medical intervention tended to make conditions only worse (you don’t want to know how a toxic ‘everlasting pill’ worked), so plenty of women avoided doctors altogether.

Resolute Elizabeth, self-effacing Lizzie, publicity-wooing Sophia: these trailblazers were on a radical quest for nothing less than equality, and as well as the slog and loneliness, Campbell’s intensively researched book captures some of the thrill and camaraderie, too.

If her prose seems jarringly perky in places, she nevertheless paints a rounded picture of each woman’s loves and losses, showing how intimately their private lives shaped their professional drive.

Did they ever actually don white coats? Lizzie and Sophia were certainly still practising when the medical profession adopted the garb as a way of signalling its newfound embrace of science.

More than any lab coat, however, their very presence was a beacon of progress, albeit one grudgingly accepted by their colleagues.