Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - Career

Career

Though she was now a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, as a woman, Garrett could not take up a medical post in any hospital. So in late 1865, Elizabeth Garrett L.S.A. opened her own practice at 20 Upper Berkeley Street, London. At first, patients were few but the practice gradually grew. After six months in practice, Elizabeth wished to open an outpatients dispensary, to enable poor women to obtain medical help from a qualified practitioner of their own gender. In 1865, there was outbreak of cholera in Britain, affecting both rich and poor, and in their panic, some people forgot any prejudices they had in relation to a female doctor. The first death due to cholera occurred in 1866, but by then Elizabeth had already opened St. Mary’s Dispensary for Women and Children, at 69 Seymour Place. In the first year, she tended to 3,000 new patients, who made 9,300 outpatient visits to the dispensary. On hearing that the Dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Sorbonne, Paris was in favour of admitting women as medical students, Elizabeth studied French so that she could apply for a medical degree, which she obtained in 1870.

The same year she was elected to the first London School Board, an office newly opened to women; Elizabeth's was the highest vote among all the candidates. Also in that year, she was made one of the visiting physicians of the East London Hospital for Children, becoming the first woman in Britain to be appointed to a medical post, but she found the duties of these two positions to be incompatible with her principal work in her private practice and the dispensary, as well as her role as a new mother, so she resigned from these posts by 1873. In 1872, the dispensary became the New Hospital for Women and Children, treating women from all over London for gynaecological conditions; the hospital moved to new premises in Marleybone Street in 1874. Around this time, Elizabeth also entered into discussion with male medical views regarding women. In 1874, Dr. Henry Maudsley’s article on Sex and Mind in Education, which argued that education for women caused over-exertion and thus, reduced their reproductive capacity, sometimes causing “nervous and even mental disorders”. Elizabeth’s counter-argument was that the real danger for women was not education but boredom and that fresh air and exercise were preferable to sitting by the fire with a novel. In the same year, she co-founded London School of Medicine for Women with Sophie Jex-Blake and became a lecturer in what was the only teaching hospital in Britain to offer courses for women. She continued to work there for the rest of her career and was as dean of the school from 1883 to 1902. This school was later called the Royal Free Hospital of Medicine, which later became part of what is now the medical school of University College London.