Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

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Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, around 1889

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson VA (born June 9, 1836 in Whitechapel , London , † December 17, 1917 in Aldeburgh , Suffolk ) was an English doctor and suffragette. She was the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the UK , the first woman to earn a doctorate in medicine in France, the first female member of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the first female dean of a medical school in the UK . As Lady Mayoress of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, she was also the UK's first female mayor. She was one of the founders of the New Hospital for Women , the first British gynecological clinic with an exclusively female staff. Garrett Anderson campaigned all his life for women's suffrage and the right of women to exercise qualified professions. Even at a young age, she saw the solution to the oppression of women in the emancipation of labor from capital.

Life

Elizabeth Garrett, 1866

Elizabeth Garrett was the second of ten surviving children of entrepreneur and merchant Newson Garrett (1812-1893) and his wife Louisa Dunnell (1813-1903) to be born in London. She grew up in the small town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where her father had become wealthy as the owner of a malt house . One of her younger sisters, Millicent Garrett Fawcett DBE (1847-1929), later became a well-known suffragette . Elizabeth, called Beth in the family, was homeschooled until she was 13 , first from her mother, then from a governess . From 1849 to 1854, she and her older sister Louie attended the renowned Academy of the Daughters of Gentlemen girls' school in Blackheath , run by the aunts of the famous poet and playwright Robert Browning . There the focus of the lessons was on good behavior, English literature, French, Italian and German. Garrett, who was considered precocious and extremely intelligent, was an excellent student, but complained about the limitations of her teachers and the lack of math and science classes.

After completing her education with a trip abroad, Elizabeth Garrett returned to the home. In addition to her domestic duties, she learned Latin and mathematics by herself, read a lot and was passionately interested in the political and social issues of the time. In 1854, while visiting school friends, she  met Emily Davies , an early feminist who later co-founded Girton College  , the first college for women in Cambridge , and became her lifelong friend and advisor.

In 1859, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first licensed female doctor in the United States, was invited by the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women to give lectures on “Medicine as a Women's Profession” in Great Britain. Garrett traveled to London to hear Blackwell, met her face to face, and decided to study medicine and become a doctor. After initial resistance, her father supported her in this revolutionary project.

Since there was no medical training for women, Garrett first worked from August 1860 as a surgical nurse in London's Middlesex Hospital . She took the opportunity to participate in surgical procedures and train medical students. Despite rejections from the universities of Oxford , Cambridge and London , Garrett continued to visit patients as a substitute nurse and worked in the pharmacy. She decided to get a license from the Society of Apothecaries (LSA). Up until now , those in Great Britain who had worked under the supervision of a doctor for five years, had attended certain lectures and had qualified by passing an examination (certificate) at the pharmacists' association were allowed to study medicine at the university. In the fall of 1865, however, the Society of Apothecaries refused to allow Garrett to take the proficiency test; then her father threatened to take the conditions to court, whereupon Garrett received the license in 1866.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in front of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, engraving, 1870

In 1866, Garrett opened her first hospital with an attached pharmacy in St. Mary's Dispensary . It was difficult for Garrett to practice as a doctor because, on the one hand, nobody wanted to rent her practice space, and on the other hand, the patients of both sexes were very skeptical of a woman. Together with Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) and Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912) she trained nurses and doctors at the London School of Medicine for Women , which later became a medical college.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1900 (copy of a painting by John Singer Sargent , attributed to Reginald Grenville Eves)

Since at that time in England women were only allowed to study and not to graduate, Garrett moved to France in 1870. She continued her studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris , thanks to the intervention of Empress Eugènie , women were allowed to study at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Garrett graduated with a doctorate in medicine that same year .

On February 9, 1871, Garrett married in London the shipowner James George Skelton Anderson († 1907) from Aberdeen , managing director of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company , and from then on bore the double name Garrett Anderson. They had three children: Margaret (1872-1873) died of meningitis , Louisa (1873-1943) was also a doctor and Alan (1877-1952) House of -Abgeordneter ( Member of Parliament ) for the Conservative Party .

In 1872 the School of Medicine for Women was added to the list of recognized medical schools. Six years later, Garrett Anderson, then a gynecologist at the New Hospital for Women , was the first doctor to perform surgical removal of ovaries . From 1883 to 1903, Garrett Anderson was the first female dean of the School of Medicine for Women .

In 1903 Garrett Anderson retired to Aldeburgh, where she was elected Britain's first female mayor five years later (1908). On December 17, 1917, she died of a heart attack among her family and was buried next to her husband in the Aldeburgh cemetery.

family

  • The English entrepreneur Arthur Anderson (1791–1868) was Garrett Anderson's uncle.
  • Garretts Anderson's niece Philippa Fawcett (1868-1948) was a British mathematician and suffragette.
  • Anderson's great-granddaughter, Winifred Flack-Barrett († 1991), was the mother of Syd Barrett (1946-2006), the co-founder, namesake and creative head of the band Pink Floyd .

Prominent patients

Honors

gallery

  • Elizabeth Garrett Anderson as Lady Mayoress of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 1908

  • Elizabeth Garrett Anderson with suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst , November 18, 1910

Works

  • Sur la migraine. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine présentée et soutenue le 15 June 1870 . A. Parent, Paris 1870 digitized
  • London School of Medicine for Women. Inaugural address .Lewis, London 1877
  • The Student's Pocket Book. (Arranged for students of the London School of Medicine for Women) . HK Lewis, London 1878
  • The medical education of women and the Medical Acts Amendment Bill. Reprinted from The Times, May 8, 1878 . London 1878 (Collected pamphlets 1)
  • The sanitary care and treatment of children and their diseases, being a series of five essays . Houghton, Mifflin, Boston 1881
  • Deaths in childbirth. Extract from the Correspondence section of the British Medical Journal, Sept. 17, 1898 . Edinburgh 1898

literature

  • Justina's Letters in Reply to Miss Garrett's Defense of the Contagious Diseases Acts . W. Tweedie, London 1870 digitized
  • Renate Strohmeier: Lexicon of the natural scientists and women of Europe - from antiquity to the 20th century . Verlag Harri Deutsch, 1998, ISBN 3-8171-1567-9 .
  • Louisa Garrett Anderson: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1836-1917 . Faber & Faber, London 1939.
  • Ruth Fox Hume: Great Women of Medicine . Random House, New York 1964.
  • Jo Manton: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson . Dutton, New York 1965.
  • MA Elston: Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett (1836-1917) . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Jo Manton: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: England's first woman physician . Methuen, London 1965.

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Garrett Anderson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Licensing information

This article in its first version of April 8, 2008 is based on the article Elizabeth Garrett Anderson of the English Wikipedia in the version of March 27, 2008 (see author list there).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Eleanor has now got out of bed again, much faster than her doctor (Madame Dr. Anderson.Garret) had hoped. […] Madame Anderson thinks that the Carlsbad water is very desirable for her complete cure ”. Karl Marx to Louis Kugelmann August 4, 1874 ( Marx-Engels-Werke . Volume 33, p. 637).
  2. ^ Bert Andréas , Jacques Grandjonc, Hans Pelger (eds.): Unknowns from Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Part I: 1840-1874 . Trier 1986, p. 157 ( writings from the Karl-Marx-Haus Trier No. 33).
personal data
SURNAME Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Garrett, Elizabeth (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English doctor and suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Whitechapel , London
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 1917
Place of death Aldeburgh , Suffolk