One of Lydia Henry’s attendance cards.
Lucy Naish with her husband, AE Naish, and some of their children.
Elizabeth Eaves was the
first woman to be
appointed to an
academic post in
medicine (1909)
Women
pioneers
of the
Medical
School
Lydia Henry was the
first female medical
graduate (1916)
Lucy Naish was a female
clinical lecturer
(appointed 1916)
Elizabeth Eaves
Lydia Henry, 1918.
The fight for British women to be
allowed to enter medical schools
began in the 1850s and encountered
stiff resistance from a profession
in which male bonding was
paramount. The idea of women
doctors was severely threatening
and the argument that they would
be exposed to ‘indelicacy’,
especially in the dissecting room,
was used as a reason for keeping
them out. Male students did not
want to tone down their language
or horseplay – the atmosphere of
the Medical School in Sheffield was
described as “coarse and vulgar
beyond imagination” in 1883.
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MEDICAL SCHOOL HERITAGE
PROJECT 2012.
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Timeline:
B floor
entrance
A ‘lady tutor in anatomy’ was first appointed in 1913 to
‘attend and give demonstrations for one hour per week to
women students only’. The second holder of this post was
Lucy Naish, who began work in 1916 and was promoted
to a lectureship in osteology two years later. She was one
of the first female doctors in Sheffield; having qualified at
the Royal Free Hospital in London, she set up a general
practice in Hillsborough in 1903 with her husband
AE Naish. They had eight children and later lived at
5 Clarkehouse Road. Lucy Naish founded the first child
welfare clinics in Sheffield and was an enthusiastic
advocate of breast-feeding. From 1918 to 1937 she gave
two lectures a week on anatomy and demonstrated at
dissections.
A
generation later, in 1905, the medical faculty of the
newly created University of Sheffield voted unanimously
to admit female students, although it took over ten years
before the first woman received a degree. Lydia Henry
was the daughter of the University’s first female lecturer,
Lysbeth Henry, who ran the ‘day training college’ for
teachers in the 1890s. Enrolling in 1908, Lydia seems to
have sailed through the course until she was forced to
take a year’s break when she contracted a serious
streptococcal throat infection in the dissecting room.
After her graduation (MB ChB) in 1916, she served with
distinction as an assistant surgeon in the hospital set up in
the Abbey of Royaumont, north of Paris and within reach
of the Western Front, and was awarded the Croix de
Guerre by the French Government. Lydia achieved an MD
(Doctor of Medicine) degree from Sheffield in 1920 for
her thesis on gas gangrene. She was the first woman and
the second MD graduate at the University. She received
an honorary degree (DSc) in 1978, the 150th anniversary
of the Medical School.
DID YOU KNOW?
The medical faculty
voted unanimously
to admit female
students in 1905.
In 1909, Elizabeth Eaves was appointed to the Physiology
Department as a ‘female junior demonstrator’. She had a
BSc degree from London University and published her
first paper, on chemical physiology, in 1910. Two years
later she was unanimously promoted to a lectureship in
physiology: one of only three women in the UK with such
a job at this time. Later she studied medicine part time,
and achieved her MB BS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor
of Surgery) in 1922 and MD in 1925. However, she never
practised medicine but remained a lecturer, teaching
physiology throughout the degree with a final exam in the
fifth year. Her research concerned the physiology and
histology of the nervous system. Elizabeth Eaves was a
mainstay of the department until her death in 1947.