Edith Pechey
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Edith Pechey-Phipson (1845-1908) was one of the first women doctors in the United Kingdom and a campaigner for women's rights. She spent more than 20 years in India as a senior doctor at a women's hospital and was involved in a range of social causes.
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[edit] Family and Edinburgh
She was born as Mary Edith Pechey in Langham, Essex, to William Pechey, a Baptist minister with an MA from Edinburgh University and his wife Sarah (née Rotton), a lawyer's daughter who, unusually for a woman of her generation, had studied Greek. After being educated by her father, Edith worked as governess and teacher before joining Sophia Jex-Blake's efforts to persuade Edinburgh medical school to teach women.
After arriving at Edinburgh University in 1869, Pechey passed her matriculation exams with honours in 1870. As the first year student with the highest marks in chemistry she seemed to be entitled to a prestigious scholarship, but this was given to a male student who did less well than her.
"In the chemical class, Miss Edith Pechey gained the third place, and was first of the first year’s students, the two men who surpassed her having attended the class before. The four students who get the highest marks receive four Hope Scholarships . . . Yet Miss Edith Pechey was held by the professor not to be entitled to the third scholarship, and omitting her name, he included two men whom she had beaten, and who stood fourth and fifth in the examination, his excuse being that women are not part of the University class, because they are separately taught. "[1]
Her appeal against this decision was rejected by the university governing body.
[edit] Early years as a doctor
In 1873 the group of seven women medical students to which she belonged had to give up the struggle to graduate at Edinburgh. One of Pechey's next steps was writing to the College of Physicians in Ireland to ask them to let her take exams leading to a license in midwifery. She worked for a time at the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Women, apparently on the strength of her testimonials and successful studies, despite the lack of an official qualification. Next she went to the University of Bern, passed her medical exams in German at the end of January 1877 and was awarded an MD. Just at that time the Irish college decided to licence women doctors, and Pechey passed their exams in Dublin in May.
During the next six years Pechey practised medicine in Leeds, involving herself in women's health education and lecturing on a number of medical topics, including nursing. She was invited to give the inaugural address when the London School of Medicine for Women opened. Partly in reaction to the exclusion of women by the International Medical Congress she set up the Medical Women's Federation of England and in 1882 was elected president. The next year Elizabeth Garrett Anderson suggested that she might like to go to Bombay (now Mumbai) and be senior medical officer of the Cama Hospital for Women and Children there.
[edit] India
Arriving at the end of 1883, she learnt Hindi fast. As well as her work at the Cama Hospital she was in charge of the Jaffer Sulleman Dispensary for women, and after a few years, she succeeded in starting a training programme for nurses at Cama. She tried to counteract tendencies to treat women as inferior to men, wishing to establish equal pay for female medical workers at the same time as campaigning for wider social reform; she also campaigned against child marriage. She often gave lectures on education and training for women and was involved with the Alexandra Native Girls' Educational Institution. Various prestigious institutions invited her to be the first woman member, including the senate of the University of Bombay and the Royal Asiatic Society.
Soon after arriving in India, Edith Pechey had met Herbert Musgrave Phipson (1849–1936), a reformer as well as wine merchant and naturalist. When they married in 1889 she started to use the surname Pechey-Phipson. Five years later ill health meant she had to give up hospital work but was able to continue for some time with her private practice which served the Bombay elite. In 1896, when bubonic plague struck the city, she played her part in public health measures, and criticisms she made of the way the crisis was handled proved to be influential in managing an outbreak of cholera.
[edit] Later years
Pechey-Phipson and her husband returned to England in 1905 and she was soon involved in the suffrage movement, representing Leeds suffragists at an International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Copenhagen in 1906. She was at the forefront of the Mud March demonstration organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1907, but was becoming ill and soon needed treatment for breast cancer. Her surgeon was May Thorne, daughter of Pechey-Phipson's student friend Isabel Thorne.
In 1908 she died at home in Folkestone, Kent. Her husband set up a scholarship at the London School of Medicine for Women in Edith's name which was granted regularly up to 1948. In India, her name continued until 1964 at the Pechey-Phipson Sanatorium for Women and Children at Nasik, Maharashtra.
[edit] References
- E. Lutzker, Edith Pechey-Phipson, M.D. in Medical History vol 11 (1); Jan 1967
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (1995)
