Eleanor Davies-Colley: The First Woman F.R.C.S.

Abstract

Women have had to fight a long and hard battle to break into the medical profession. In 1876, after a long and hard battle, the General Medical Council (the GMC) agreed to accept women for registration as medical practitioners. In 1895 the staff of the London School of Medicine for Women and of the Royal Free Hospital for Women, headed by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the Dean and the first woman to obtain the Licentiate Diploma of the Society of Apothecaries, (the LSA), which she had achieved thirty years before, petitioned the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) with the request that their College examinations should be thrown open to women. This petition was rejected by both Colleges -by the surgeons at their annual meeting of Fellows and Members by 58 votes to 39, and by the physicians at an extraordinary meeting of its Comitia to consider this petition by 59 votes to 50.