In 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in Britain to qualify as a physician and surgeon, exploiting a loophole in the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries’ admissions process and passing her exams at the first attempt.
Barred from hospital posts — including Westminster — she opened her own practice on Euston Road, London, run by women, for women.
A trailblazer in every sense, she went on to become Britain’s first female Mayor, the first female Dean of a medical school, and the first woman to sit on a school board of governors. By 1914, more than 1,000 women were practising as doctors in England — but the fight for equality in medicine was far from over.
