Alexandra Mary Chalmers Watson
| Dr Mona Chalmers Watson | |
|---|---|
A half length portrait of Chalmers Watson, wearing the uniform of Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps.
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| Born |
Alexandra Mary Campbell Geddes 31 May 1872 India |
| Died | 7 August 1936 (aged 64) Frensham, Rolvenden, Kent, England |
| Occupation |
Physician Nutritionist Head, Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (during World War I) |
Dr Alexandra Mary Chalmers Watson CBE, MD (née Geddes; 31 May 1872 - 7 August 1936), known as Mona Chalmers Watson, was a Scottish physician and head of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. The first woman to receive an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh, she helped found the Elsie Inglis Hospital for Women, was the first president of the Edinburgh Women's Citizen Association, a staff physician and later senior physician at the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, and co-edited the Encyclopaedia Medica with her husband, Douglas Chalmers Watson. At the time of her death in 1936, she was president of the Medical Women's Foundation, having been elected May 1935.
Alexandra Mary Campbell Geddes was born in India on 31 May 1872, the daughter of Auckland Campbell Geddes (1831–1908), a civil engineer, and Christina Helen MacLeod Geddes (née Anderson; 1850–1914). Chalmers Watson was to be the eldest of five children in the Geddes family; from 1888-1890 she was educated at St Leonard's School in St Andrews, Scotland. When She turned her focus towards the study of medicine, it was the latest in a lengthy familial interest in the pursuit: not only had her mother supported Christian Guthrie Wright and Louisa Stevenson in the foundation of the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (later Queen Margaret University), but she had also been an early campaigner on behalf of the cause of medical education for women. Through her mother Chalmers Watson also claimed kinship to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in England, and her maternal aunt, Mary Marshall (née Anderson) had been one of the original women admitted to study medicine alongside Sophia Jex-Blake at the University of Edinburgh in 1871, later qualifying in Paris.
Chalmers Watson began her medical education at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1891, graduating MBChM from the University of Edinburgh in 1896. After her graduation, she spent a year in London working as a physician at the Maternity District Association at Plaistow; she also spent six months working at Dr Barnardo's Holmes in Kent.
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