Various

In the early nineteenth century it was impossible for women to practice as doctors in Great Britain. The alternative choice of nursing was seen as a corrupt profession of the unskilled and the lower classes until the middle of the century. Both attitudes were caused by women's lack of access to training in the profession, largely through the parallel lack of access to training in universities and colleges that were only open to men. The one role open to them, midwifery, was constantly undermined and devalued due to this very lack of university education involved in learning its skills. In America the situation was slightly different: the English-born Elizabeth Blackwell had become the first woman in the United States to qualify as a doctor though rejection by male colleagues forced her to set up a women's hospital in New York. Visits to London in the 1850s led to work at the St Bartholomew's Hospital and friendship with Florence Nightingale. In 1859 the General Medical Council admitted her to the Medical Register but the following year a special GMC charter made it possible to exclude doctors with foreign medical degrees, leaving women who had qualified on foreign soil open to attack. Nonetheless, in 1869 Blackwell moved permanently to London and there established the London School of Medicine for Women in 1870, as well as the National Health Society. Blackwell's influence on British women intending to enter medicine was already great: in 1862 the Female Medical Society was established and Elizabeth Garrett decided to enter the profession under her advice. However, Garrett's initial attempts to enter several medical schools failed due to the continuing refusal of universities to accept female students. Instead, she was forced to become a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, a profession that had become respectable through the work of Nightingale and her colleagues in professionalising nursing training and practice. Nevertheless, it came to light that the Society of Apothecaries did not specify that females were banned from taking their examinations and in 1865 Garrett sat and passed their examination before the loophole that allowed this was closed. Other countries began to allow women to enter the profession: in 1864 the University of Zurich admitted female students while the universities of Paris, Berne and Geneva followed suit in 1867. Garrett later was appointed visiting physician to the East London Hospital but though she subsequently graduated from the University of Paris, the British Medical Register refused to recognise her MD degree. In the next few years she opened the women-run New Hospital for Women in London with Elizabeth Blackwell and helped Sophia Jex-Blake to establish the London Medical School for Women to which Garrett Anderson was elected Dean of the London School of in 1884. The legal situation of women who wished to become doctors did not change, however. Though Edinburgh University allowed Sophia Jex-Blake and Edith Pechy to attend medical lectures in 1869, male fellow students rioted and their final examinations were rendered void as university regulations only allowed medical degrees to be given to men. The consequence of this was that the British Medical Association therefore refused to register the women as doctors. However, Russell Gurney, a MP and supporter of women's rights took the first legal steps to remedying the situation and in 1876 the Enabling Act was passed that allowed universities to award female students degrees in their subject. This meant that all medical training bodies were now free to teach women in this area if they chose to do so. The following year the Royal Free Hospital admitted women medical students for clinical training and the University of London adopted a new charter in 1878 that allowed women to graduate from their courses. Individual institutions were slowly forced to change their practices to permit women to hold their degrees, though some, like Oxford and Cambridge, resisted until 1920 and 1948 respectively. By 1891, 101 women doctors were in practice in the British Isles, and the following years the British Medical Association was finally forced to admit women doctors.