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‘Edinburgh Seven’ continued with their education until 1873 when they lost a legal
challenge against the university after it had decided that they could not pursue their
medical degrees. The women then sought medical degrees abroad, but these
degrees were worthless if women were prohibited from registering in Britain. The
1858 Medical Act had prohibited anyone with foreign medical degrees who had
qualified prior to 1858 from registering in the United Kingdom.
However, Jex-Blake and her cohort were beginning to gain support from politicians
such as Russell Gurney (1804-1878), a British MP whose wife Emelia was a
campaigner for women’s higher education, and William Francis Cowper-Temple
(1811-1888). Cowper-Temple, an English politician, attempted to have a bill passed
in 1875 to allow women to enrol as students at Scottish universities but this was
withdrawn so as to allow the universities concerned to decide what action to take.
He then promoted another bill to allow women with foreign medical degrees
achieved since 1858 to be registered in the country. The reason for the gendered
focus of this bill was presumably because of the fact that men already had the
option of taking university degrees in the United Kingdom while women did not. The
matter was discussed by the GMC and was heavily covered in the British Medical
Journal. The GMC did not come to a firm conclusion on the matter, stating that they
‘were not prepared to say that women ought to be excluded from the profession’.
Cowper-Temple then withdrew his bill and Russell Gurney promoted his Enabling
Bill which was a better compromise since it did not insist that women with foreign
degrees should be entitled to register but rather, it gave the nineteen licensing
bodies the option, if they so wished, to allow women with these degrees to take
their examinations. 39
The Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in London composed a petition
against what the Medical Times and Gazette termed ‘this petty patchwork attempt
at legislation’ on the grounds that it was narrow in focus since it was not open to
men with foreign degrees and because they questioned whether the degrees of
foreign universities should be ‘allowed the privilege’ of registering in Britain. 40 In
39
Annis Gillie, ‘Elizabeth Blackwell and the “Medical Register” from 1858’, BMJ, November
22 nd , 1958, pp.1253-7, on p.1256.
40
‘Bill for the registration of foreign medical degrees held by women’, Medical Times and
Gazette, April 24 th , 1875, p.446.
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