South London Hospital For Women and Children - Foundation

Foundation

Eleanor Davies-Colley and Maud Chadburn, two surgeons at the New Hospital for Women (later the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, now the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital), began raising funds in 1911 for a new South London general hospital for women and children, with the aim of employing an all-woman medical staff. The New Hospital (the first hospital to be run along these lines) was increasingly unable to cope with the demand for its services, and many women were being turned away untreated. At that time, such hospitals served the dual purpose of improving medical care for women and enhancing career prospects for female medical practitioners, as many hospitals refused to employ women. Since the foundation of the New Hospital in 1872, the rationale for women-only hospitals had evolved from protecting feminine modesty to providing treatment choices for women, reflecting the growth of feminism during this period.

Aided by Davies-Colley's cousin Harriet Weaver, publisher of The Freewoman, and other feminists, enough money was raised to open an outpatients' department in Newington Causeway in 1912. A caustic letter to The Times from a medical practitioner who declared the project to be unnecessary, as any demand for women to treat women was an artificial result of women forcing themselves into medicine, seems to have sparked the major donation: £53,000 for building plus a £40,000 endowment. With such generous funding, progress was swift: a purpose-built eighty-bed hospital on Clapham Common, designed by architect ME Collins, was opened by Queen Mary on 4 July 1916. Staffed entirely by women, it was the ninth general women's hospital in Britain to be run in this way, and the largest, thanks to the size of its endowment. Weaver became their first Honorary Secretary.

The South London Hospital included not only charity wards where patients paid only what they could afford, but also private rooms for which patients paid a set fee of 1–3 guineas per week. This reflected a trend in the later wave of women's hospitals (founded after the 1890s) towards treating a broader range of women, including the growing middle classes. The terms of the endowment strictly required that the hospital should employ only female doctors and admit only women, with the exception of children under seven. In fact, according to Chadburn's unpublished memoirs, the hospital's first inpatient only just qualified, being a boy of almost seven who had been injured in an accident involving a laundry van (cited by Elston).