Orkney’s Pioneering Women Doctors

Quietly and meticulously, volunteer researchers in Orkney have been uncovering the work women doctors did in the islands prior to the formation of the National Health Service.

An exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, pulls together what Fiona Sanderson has brought to light about Beatrice Garvie, who was the doctor on North Ronaldsay from 1930 to 1946, in a collaborative project with the island community.

The exhibition is simply wonderful. Beautifully presented in the upstairs of the Pier Arts Centre, Dr Garvie’s photographs record the lives and community of a past way of life. The images show islanders at work and coming together at family occasions, at ease with being captured on camera.

Fiona Sanderson worked for two years with pupils at the North Ronaldsay school and the island’s community to not just discover aspects of what life was like for Dr Garvie and the influence she had in the island, but to extend that further expressing their findings in a creative way. Don’t miss the animated film the younger islanders made which can be viewed in the small room adjoining the main exhibition area.

Give yourself plenty of time to visit because there’s lots to see and find out about the other women doctors who worked in Orkney during the period before the National Health Service came into being. A quilt wall-hanging displays elements of their careers with an explosion of creative sewing and embroidery.

The Orkney Women Doctors Project (1894 – 1948) has so far discovered fifty women serving across the islands. Some stayed a short time but others like Dr Harriet Taylor worked in Shapinsay from 1925 – 1946. The project is also recording Orcadian born women doctors who left Orkney to work elsewhere.

The late-nineteenth century was a watershed for women’s entry into the medical profession. In the twenty years that followed the Medical Act of 1858 and the creation of the Medical Register, only two women had qualified to practice medicine in Britain. Whilst medical men fought to legitimise their profession, they also sought to curate a professional identity that was inherently coded as male. As such, they excluded female healers from medical education and examination which, following the 1858 Act, became mandatory for obtaining a medical licence. – So Radical a Change

In the last half of the 19th century, women had to campaign and faced discrimination in their determination to study medicine at universities.

In 1892, women were formally admitted to Edinburgh University for the first time as a consequence of the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889. In 1894, the University announced that it would admit women for graduation in the Faculty of Medicine, but for many years they continued to be taught separately.

It was only in 1916, with the First World War bringing a much higher percentage of female students and a growing demand for their medical skills, that the Faculty of Medicine admitted women on an entirely equal footing to men. Admission of Women to Faculty of Medicine, 1916

The research group has done a magnificent job in finding out so much already about this almost unknown aspect of the history of Orkney.

The project has an informative blog which it is developing as more stories come to light  Orkney Women Doctors Project (1894 to 1948)

And a Facebook page: Orkney Women Doctors (1894 to 1948).

This is an ongoing project and the researchers hope to tour the islands with some of the exhibits and engage with local communities to uncover more stories about the women doctors.

Fiona Grahame