International Women’s Day: The First Women in Medicine at St Andrews and Dundee

Tomorrow (8th of March) is International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate women’s achievements and raise awareness of the issues women still face. In this blog we highlight the first women to receive medical degrees from the University of St Andrews.

Medicine plays an important part in the history of women at St Andrews University. Elizabeth Garrett, the first woman to sign the University matriculation register in 1862, did so in the hopes of gaining the required medical education to pass the exams of the Society of Apothecaries. Her matriculation was ultimately refused on the grounds of legality, but she was to succeed in becoming a doctor, passing the exams of the Society of Apothecaries in 1865 and being awarded an MD in Paris in 1870.

Sophia Jex-Blake, a leading campaigner for the medical education of women, studied at Edinburgh in 1869. Alongside six others, known as the Edinburgh Seven, they attended medical classes at Edinburgh. Their campaign culminated with the Surgeon’s Hall riot in November 1870 in which the women were met with an angry mob when attempting to sit their anatomy examination. Jex-Blake was undeterred and petitioned the University of St Andrews multiple times in relation to medical education for women.

In 1893 she wrote to Senatus requesting affiliation between St Andrews and the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women which she had set up in 1886. The same year, Lord Bute, who had financed the Bute Medical Buildings and was an advocate for women’s education, invited Jex-Blake to Falkland Palace to meet with William Carmichael McIntosh, Professor of Natural History at St Andrews to discuss women’s education in medicine. McIntosh reports in his autobiography:

‘The meeting was very pleasant, for I found Miss Jex-Blake both refined and courteous, full of zeal for her cause, and thoroughly acquainted with medical education’.

It would not be until 1905 however that the first women would take to the graduation stage at St Andrews to receive a medical degree from the University. In the graduation roll we see that in the first cohort of women to receive the MB ChB (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) degree was Jessie Balsillie, Alice Jean Donaldson and Elizabeth H B MacDonald in July 1905.

Jessie Balsillie (1881-1940). A St Andrews resident (Greyfriars Gardens), Jessie was the daughter of coal merchant and Baillie for St Andrews Burgh, Andrew Balsillie. Jessie matriculated at the age of 17 in 1897-1898. After graduation she went on to serve as the Maternity and Child Welfare Officer at Stoke on Trent for 25 years before her sudden death in 1940 (St Andrews Citizen Obituary, 22 June 1940).

Two of her siblings also attended St Andrews. Her sister Isabella Balsillie studied from 1899-1900 to 1903-1904. Her brother David Balsillie (d.1954) graduated BSc with special distinction in Geology in July 1911. David went on to be Assistant Keeper of the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh.

Alice Jean Donaldson (Calman) (b.1878). Alice, originally from Tayport, later Dundee, was not the first in her family to study with St Andrews as her sister Edith C Donaldson received her LLA qualification in 1896.

We don’t know much about Alice’s own career. However, we do know that she married William Thomas Calman, student at University College Dundee and assistant to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in the Zoology department. Calman later became the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum before returning to St Andrews as lecturer in the 1940s.

The papers of DW Thompson include letters from Alice, including one asking D’Arcy to congratulate her husband on his CB award in 1935, and acknowledging how much D’Arcy meant to him.

Elizabeth Horne Bain MacDonald (Bryson) (1880-1969). Elizabeth was born the fourth child in a family of nine in Dundee. Her father Donald MacDonald was a journalist and published the Will o’ the Wisp Flashes (1890). Her mother Elizabeth Bain was a teacher. Amongst the three 1905 women graduates, we know the most about Elizabeth H B MacDonald, as she published her autobiography, Look Back in Wonder, in 1966.

Elizabeth won a bursary to attend Harris Academy, Dundee. It was her mother who encouraged the importance of education, recounting her own experiences of teacher training college in Edinburgh and of her own wish to attend University had they been open to her. Her mother referenced Jex-Blake’s experiences, and it was the name Jex-Blake that sparked Elizabeth’s interest in becoming a doctor:

So it happened that my mother, a country girl of eighteen from the far North of Scotland, seeking education and teacher-training in Edinburgh, saw Jex-Blake and her companions being roughly treated – “pelted with mud” – in the streets of Edinburgh and was so stirred that she never forgot the sight. And I was never to forget the fire in my mother’s eyes when she spoke of Jex-Blake!

In 1896 Elizabeth passed the University Preliminary examination at the age of 16. She was too young to go straight into the medical degree (the regulations stated that she needed to be 19) and so she did an arts degree first. In her autobiography she recounts her memories of her first year – getting the 7:10 train from Dundee to St Andrews to attend her 8 am Mathematics tutorial and the janitor’s wife, Mrs Coutts, often taking pity on her and welcoming her in on a cold morning for hot tea.

She graduated with a First Class MA in English Literature in 1900. Her hopes of winning a scholarship however were dashed. Elizabeth was called before Senate and as she recounts how Principal Donaldson ‘in a somewhat subdued tone – [said] how sorry they all were that they could not award me the scholarship… Why? Because I was a woman.’ Undeterred, with a bursary of £30 a year, Elizabeth continued her studies at the Bute Medical School in St Andrews and the Medical School at University College, Dundee.

Elizabeth followed her MB ChB with an MD in 1907 with a thesis titled ‘A Classification of the Pathological Changes affecting the Endometrium’.

Elizabeth was active in the Student Representative Council in Dundee. From her autobiography we learn that an informal visit of Mrs Louise Carnegie and a few friends (Mrs Woodrow Wilson, Mrs Choate and Lady Donaldson) meant Elizabeth as the Vice-President of the Union, was to provide the first lunch in the new Dundee Union dining halls. She had a favourable impression of Mrs Carnegie and their conversation, and liked to think she played a part in the gift of the Women’s Union to St Andrews by the Carnegies the following year. Subsequent travelling students would no longer have to rely on the hospitality of the janitor’s wife for hot tea!

On the day of the final exams results being posted, Elizabeth recounts that the three women in the class, Alice, Jessie and herself went to a “Palmist” in Dundee. There were told that Alice was to be married soon, Jessie was an enigma, and Elizabeth was to travel a lot. This turned out to be true as Alice married a year after graduation, not much is known about Jessie and Elizabeth moved to New Zealand to set up medical practice in 1908. Elizabeth went on to specialise in gynaecology and women’s health. Margaret Menzies Campbell reported in her lecture ‘Pandora’s box‘ that Professor Yule Mackay, Principal of University College, Dundee wrote of Elizabeth as “one of the most brilliant and most capable graduates in medicine he had known”.

Many of the earliest women graduates from Scottish Universities went on to have medical careers. Agnes Forbes Blackadder Savill, the first female graduate of the University of St Andrews in 1895, later graduated MB ChB from Glasgow in 1898 and MD in 1901. The first Glasgow female graduate, and one of the first women to receive a medical degree from a Scottish University (Glasgow), Marion Gilchrist (MB CM 1894), completed the LLA (Ladies Literate in Arts) qualification from St Andrews in 1890. Marion’s niece, Margaret Menzies Campbell (nee Shirlaw) was also a St Andrews graduate (MB ChB 1918) and as co-editor of College Echoes in 1916 suggested in the magazine the foundation of the Bute Medical Society, a society which is still active today.

Sarah Rodriguez
Muniments Archivist