Irish Women in Medicine, c.1880s–1920s: Origins, Education, and Careers by Laura Kelly (review)

The title of Enid Moberly Bell’s 1953 chronicle of women’s fight to enter medicine in the United Kingdom, Storming the Citadel, encapsulates the kind of struggle women had to fight to enter the profession there.¹ Thomas Bonner’s 1992 To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine suggests the quest for learning that drove women denied opportunities in their own countries to seek medical education in Zurich, Paris, and Geneva.² Laura Kelly’s analysis of the entry of women to the Irish medical profession builds on Bonner’s work (among others) and tells a different story to that of Moberly Bell. In Ireland, the medical profession demonstrated a “liberality of thought” (p. 190) that led to the admission of women to the Kings and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland in 1877. The first ten women licentiates of the KQCPI were women who had trained at Zurich, Bern, Paris, Montpellier, and Brussels and included those who were disappointed in Edinburgh, Mary Edith Pechey and Sophia Jex Blake.

Kelly’s close examination of 759 women who matriculated in medicine at Irish institutions between 1885 and 1922 is a careful study that betrays its origins in a thesis. She follows the aspiring women doctors from their enrolment to subsequent careers. The daughters of middle-class men (11 percent were the daughters of doctors), who were likely to have been schooled at the relatively new Ladies’ Collegiate schools, many were imbued with a vocation. Ireland, where the Catholic sisterhoods played a crucial role both in schooling and hospital care, meant that role models abounded for young women aspiring to work in health care. Kelly suggestively argues that it may have been the embedded role of nuns in health care provision that led leaders of the medical profession and the church to facilitate the entry of women into medicine. Yet it was Protestant women who took most advantage of this opportunity.

The database that Kelly has compiled provides the backbone of the book, and it provides a wealth of fascinating information on backgrounds and destinations and allows comparison with other studies done of English and Scottish women. The biographical index provided will be useful to other scholars. The author is keen to reach beyond the bare biographical information to the chart the experiences of medical students, demonstrating the general Irish inclusive attitude to women doctors reached its limit with dissection. Women had to undertake dissection separately from the men. Ladies’ rooms for women students also provided a degree of separation, and Kelly argues that women were keen to distance themselves from “the stereotype of the rowdy male medical student” (p. 103).

General practice was the most common destination for the 452 women who actually graduated, followed by hospital appointments. Kelly shows that the opportunities that opened up for women in the First World War tailed off in Ireland during the interwar years, when women were less likely to attain hospital appointments in Ireland than in England. A number of graduates built careers in England, including Jane Fulton O’Connor, discussed as one of the case studies of five women graduates that serve to give a greater insight of the personal challenges in medicine.

Kelly’s work is alive to the particularities of the Irish context that gave women different opportunities, and her work is very valuable for this reason. Her sample provides a good basis for comparison, and in particular it would be very instructive to know the ways in which men’s careers, both in college and after, differed. Some context on the wider health care provision in Ireland, on women in the other professions, and on the links between medical women and the suffrage campaign might have helped to throw the experiences of this particular group of women into wider relief.