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Chapter 1
The admission of women to Irish medical schools
Let British degrees continue to be of perfectly definite value; make the
conditions as stringent as you please, but let them be such as are attainable
by all students, and are clearly understood by the general public; and then, for
all that would worthily win and wear the desired honours, “a fair field and no
favour”. Is there not one of the English, Scotch or Irish Universities that will
win future laurels by now taking the lead generously, and announcing its
willingness to cease, at last, its policy of arbitrary exclusion?
Sophia Jex-Blake, 1872 1
Writing in 1872, Sophia Jex-Blake pleaded for a British university to open its doors
to women doctors and allow them to qualify alongside men. Jex-Blake, a leading
British campaigner for women’s admission to the medical profession had by this
time been attempting to gain access to medical education for ten years. After a visit
to America in 1862 where she worked at the New England Hospital for Women and
Children in Boston and was inspired by Lucy Sewell, one of America’s pioneer
female physicians, Jex-Blake applied to study medicine at Harvard in 1867 but was
rejected. She returned home to Britain and was accepted along with six other
women, to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. As is well-known,
Jex-Blake and her cohort experienced great difficulties while studying at Edinburgh
from both their lecturers and fellow students, and in 1873, were told that they would
be unable to qualify with medical degrees from the institution.
The Irish Times reported in June, 1874, that ‘it was an unfortunate day for
Edinburgh when that band of would-be “lady doctors” knocked at the College gates
for admission’. The writer of the article spoke strongly against the admission of
women to study medicine, arguing that undergraduates were unruly enough but that
a ‘University filled with females who would call names if they did not pass [this being
a jibe at one of the Edinburgh cohort who claimed she was treated unfairly by the
1 Sophia Jex-Blake, ‘Medicine as a profession for women’ in: Medical women: two essays,
(Edinburgh: William Oliphant & Co., 1872), p.68.
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