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women in medicine and the admission of women to the medical profession in Britain
has tended to be excluded or often briefly passed over in histories of the subject. It
is evident; however, that Ireland played an important role in the rise of the female
medical practitioner in Britain in the late nineteenth century. This chapter will
examine the contemporary arguments for and against women in the medical
profession and the debates surrounding the decision of the Irish colleges to admit
women to their institutions.
There is evidence to suggest that Ireland possessed a history of women
doctors starting as early as the sixteenth century. Elizabeth I granted a charter to
the Dublin guild of barber-surgeons in 1572 allowing them to practice, with the
translation of the charter reading that she granted the guild leader permission to
‘make a Fraternity or Guild of the Art of Barbers of his City of Dublin to be for ever
called or named the Fraternity or Guild of Saint Mary Magdalene to consist of
themselves and other persons as well Men and Women and to receive and accept
of any other persons whatsoever fit and discreet and freely willing to join them as
Brothers and Sisters of the Fraternity or Guild aforesaid.’ 7 This suggests that both
women and men were allowed to join the guild although we do not know if many
women actually worked as barber-surgeons in Dublin in this period. Similarly,
women were entitled to hold the licence of midwifery from the KQCPI, with one
woman, “Mistress Cormack” receiving the licence in 1696. 8 Details concerning
women in medicine in Ireland in the eighteenth century are even hazier. In England
in this period there is evidence of women “surgeonesses” until 1841, with English
census returns showing no woman described as ‘surgeon’, ‘apothecary’ or
‘physician’, though there were 676 midwives and 12,476 nurses listed. 9 Wyman
argues that the fall of the female practitioner was as a result of the rise of the
apothecary. Moreover, the re-organisation of the medical profession caused by the
1858 Medical Act, which also applied to Ireland, resulted in the exclusion of
outsiders. The act did not specifically exclude women but with the emphasis now
placed on standardisation of medical qualifications from universities, to which
7 Sir Charles A. Cameron, History of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and of the
Irish schools of medicine including numerous biographical sketches; also a medical
bibliography, (Dublin: Fannin & Company, 1886), pp.60-61.
8 Cameron, History of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, p.100.
9 A.L. Wyman, ‘The surgeoness: the female practitioner of surgery, 1400-1800’, Medical
History, 28: 22-41, (1984) p.39.
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