View/Open - ARAN - National University of Ireland, Galway

comprising £1048. 96 Not only was income up but by 1877, the finances of the
College were in a healthier state. Whereas in 1875, the College balance at the end
of the half-term in October 1875 had been £1476, two years later, the balance had
risen to £2526. It is possible that the council of the college viewed the admission of
women to take its medical licences as a means of generating income.
Perhaps important to this was the fact that since the late seventeenth century,
women had been entitled to take the midwifery licence at the KQCPI if they so
wished, with Mistress Cormack, mentioned earlier, taking a licence in 1696, and
Mrs. Catherine Banford taking a licence in 1732, although no further women took
the licence in midwifery until 1877. 97 It is possible that the college did not see a
great difference between admitting women to do this and admitting women to take
licences in medicine.
As we know, in January, 1877, Eliza Louisa Walker Dunbar became the first female
licentiate of the KQCPI, but this was the climax of over three years of petitioning by
some other women. In December, 1873, Mary Edith Pechey (KQCPI, 1877) had
written to the KQCPI requesting to know the power of the College to admit women
to examination and to give them a licence in Midwifery, and, if such a licence would
be registerable under the Medical Act of 1858. 98 Pechey, born in Colchester,
England, was the daughter of a Baptist minister William Pechey and his wife Sarah.
Pechey presumably expected that the College would be more likely to award
women licences in midwifery than medicine. In 1874, the Council of the KQCPI
informed Pechey that ‘women have been examined for a Licence in Midwifery by
the King and Queen’s College of Physicians and that the College will be prepared to
examine Women for a Qualification in Midwifery, but are unable to state whether
such Qualification is Registerable under the Medical Act’. 99
Pechey, along with Jex-Blake and Annie Clark, another of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’,
went to the University of Bern in order to undertake further medical study. Pechey
96
Summary of the Income and Expenditure of the KQCPI for half year ended October 17,
1877, Minutes of the KQCPI, Vol.16, p.402.
97
Information from Robert Mills, librarian at the Royal College of Physicians, Dublin.
98 nd
Minutes of the KQCPI, ‘Ordinary Meeting, Friday, 2 of January, 1874’, Minute Book Vol.
15, p.342.
99 nd
Minutes of the KQCPI, ‘Ordinary Meeting, Friday, 2 of Jan., 1874’, M.B. No. 15, p.343.
42