PIONEER IN MEDICINE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4527, 5 April 1934, Page 6

PIONEER IN MEDICINE

EARLY WOMAN DOCTOR. If the average citizen (both lay and profession) of sixty-nine years ago could revisit Australia and note the growing brigade of successful women physicians that now exist, they would no doubt die of mid-Victorian shock. Yet there were hardy pioneers even in those days. Dr. W. G. Upjohn resurrected the memory in one of his recent addresses to members of the Victorian B.M.A. (reported in the Medical Journal of Australia).

It was the year 1865—when search parties for the explorer Leichhardt were beginning to be urged, when bushrangers ambushed gold escorts in New South Wales, when men wore whiskers and women fainted on the slightest provocation—that an American vessel arrived in Melbourne. From it the ship's surgeon stepped ashore. She was Mrs. Ferguson, M.D., of the University of Philadelphia. Her arrival apparently filled the mid-Vic-torian souls of the "colonials" with horror. This shameless woman not only gloried in her "ma'nnishness," but actually applied for medical registration, with the intention of practising in Australia.

Such a thing was, of course, unheard of. Her application was forwarded to the Attorney-General, who no doubt shelved it, as history has no further record of Mrs. Ferguson. But an idea of the popular feeling on the matter can be gleaned from the tirade of the editor of the Medical Journal of that time.

After foaming over the fact that this u'nsexed woman hailed from America, where bloomers and "woman's rights" originated, he states: "A woman who has voluntarily devoted herself to a state in which the abandonment of the domestic qualifications seems a necessity is a being whom men do not love, and with whom women can hardly sympathise." He adds the quaint prediction: "There is little fear that in any British community medical women will exist as a class. They will occasionally be imported like other curiosities, and the public will wonder at them just as it wonders at dancing dogs, fat boys, and bearded ladies."