on this cheat sheet
Everything on the GCSE History Women in Medicine: Nightingale, Seacole, Garrett Anderson and Jex-Blake poster is written out below, section by section. Use it to search the sheet, copy parts into your own notes, or check a fact quickly.
Four women forced their way into a male profession in the 19th century, at a time when both nursing and medicine were almost closed to them, improving care and training and opening the door for women to become doctors.
Florence Nightingale
- Florence Nightingale went to the Crimean War in 1854 and transformed the filthy military hospitals through cleanliness and organisation, cutting the death rate sharply.
- She made nursing a trained, respected profession and opened a nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London in 1860.
- She designed cleaner hospitals built as separate pavilion wards with good ventilation, and used clear statistics, including her rose diagrams, to prove that hygiene saved lives.
- Her ideas on hygiene and ward design shaped how hospitals were built for decades afterwards.
Mary Seacole
- Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse, was turned down by the British authorities but paid her own way to the Crimea.
- She set up the British Hotel near Balaclava in 1855, treating and caring for wounded soldiers close to the front.
- She used herbal remedies she had learned in the Caribbean, such as mustard plasters and herbal teas for cholera.
- Though the authorities had shut her out, she won the respect of the soldiers and of Queen Victoria.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, in 1865.
- Shut out of the medical schools, she trained privately and qualified through the Society of Apothecaries, which then closed that route to other women.
- She founded the New Hospital for Women in London in 1872, staffed entirely by women and offering them training, and in 1908 became Britain's first female mayor.
Sophia Jex-Blake
- Sophia Jex-Blake led the fight for women to train as doctors, not only to nurse.
- She and six others, the Edinburgh Seven, enrolled at Edinburgh University in 1869 but met hostility and even riots, and the university refused to let them graduate.
- She helped found the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, which trained hundreds of women doctors, and campaigns like hers led to the 1876 law that let women be licensed as doctors.