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men for anatomy classes would be issue for Irish medical schools, as will be
discussed in Chapter 3.
Sophia Jex-Blake, who was arguably the most vocal authority on the medical
education of women in the period, argued that women’s emotional natures in fact
made them very suited to the medical profession, stating, ‘Women have more love
of medical work, and are naturally more inclined, and more fitted for it than most
men’. 30 Jex-Blake insisted that there was a ‘very widespread desire...among women
for the services of doctors of their own sex’. 31 Such arguments continued into the
early twentieth century. In 1903, Ethel Lamport, an English female doctor who
trained at the London School of Medicine for Women in the 1890s declared that
women were entitled to be treated by a female physician if they so desired. 32 In
Ireland, when the Munster branch of the Irish Association of Women Graduates and
Candidate Graduates wrote to the Victoria Hospital for Diseases of Women and
Children in Cork requesting that a female doctor be appointed to the hospital’s staff,
they argued that often women patients preferred to be treated by female
physicians. 33
It was claimed too that women patients found it easier to tell their problems to a
female doctor. Teresa Billington-Greig (1877-1964), a suffragette who established
the Women’s Freedom League, commented on the fact that women doctors were
better qualified to treat women because they could empathise with problems
specific to women. 34 As well as this, she argued that it was much easier for a
woman to talk about all of her medical problems to a female doctor rather than to a
male one and that in many cases, women refrained from seeing their [male] doctor
because of the dread they had of the consultation and examination involved. 35 Jex-
Blake cited the example of the Boston Hospital for Women and Children where
30 Sophia Jex-Blake, ‘The medical education of women’, a paper read at the Social Science
Congress, Norwich, October 1873, (London, 1874), p.3.
31 Jex-Blake, ‘The medical education of women’, p.4.
32 Ethel F. Lamport, ‘Medicine as a profession for women’, in: Education and professions,
The women’s library, Vol. 1, (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903), p.257.
33 Undated letter (from period 1902-13) from the Munster Branch of the Irish Association of
Women Graduates and Candidate Graduates to the Board of Management of Victoria
Hospital, Cork, (UCD archives: NUWGA1/3).
34 Teresa Billington-Greig, ‘Why we need women doctors’, in: Woman’s Wider World –
weekly syndicated article, February 28 th , 1913, (Women’s Library, London: 7/TBG2/G7).
35 Billington-Greig, ‘Why we need women doctors’.
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