Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake

IT is difficult to realise that her life links up with our century, and that her magnificent efforts for the right of her sex to practise medicine belongs to the nineteenth. This one woman fought the medical faculty of the entire United Kingdom single-handed and beat them, to the great advantage of humanity.

Daughter of an ecclesiastical lawyer, sister of a headmaster of Rugby, at 25 she went to the United States, where, gaining the friendship of a famous woman doctor, she set herself to the study of medicine and surgery, and then sought to qualify here as a doctor.

The London schools closed their doors against her, but Edinburgh at first relented and established separate classes at the University for female medical students. Interest or panic caused the University to reverse its public-spirited policy and withdraw the privilege granted.

Sophia and her student associates carried the matter into the law courts and obtained a verdict enabling them to continue and complete their medical studies, but in a higher court this decision was quashed.

Miss Jex-Blake returned to London and opened the London School of Medicine for Women. Within three years the Royal Free Hospital admitted her students to practice. Meanwhile the war continued.

Her persistent endeavours did not pass un-noted in Parliament with leading members of which she was constantly in touch, amiably inciting, prompting, priming, even roughing out a draft bill on the subject. Finally in 1876 an act was passed enabling all medical examining bodies to include women candidates.

In 1877 she was able to put up a sign as the first lady doctor in this country. The battle was now won and, returning to Edinburgh, she promoted with unabated energy the education of women for whose right to enter the medical profession she had so heroically striven.

She passed the last twelve happy years of her life at Rotherfield, dying at 72, just before the Great War began.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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