Female Medical Society

The Female Medical Society was a British social organisation established in 1862 to promote the employment of women to treat women and children, and to act as midwives. Under its aegis, the first medical college for women, the Ladies' Medical College was founded in 1864, albeit with limited aims and a short life-span.

The society was established at a time when women were effectively barred from becoming doctors in the UK by the Medical Act 1858, which required physicians to pass examinations offered by any of 19 examination boards, none of which permitted the admission of women. The practice of midwifery was unregulated, and was undertaken either by self-trained working class women, or by male physicians. The male medical establishment, as a rule, opposed encroachment on what it considered to be its territory by women.

The Society was established by James Edmunds, a physician at the British Lying-In Hospital in Holburn, and the social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury acted as its first president. Patrons included the rising Frederick Temple Blackwood, Henry Edward Manning, George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll and Elizabeth Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, and Catherine Gladstone, wife of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Professionals who lent support included physicians serving at a number of London hospitals, and William Buchanan, a former master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.

Concerns providing the impetus for the foundation of the society included a desire to raise the status of midwifery such that it could be considered a profession for educated women; to respect the feelings of female patients who preferred to be tended by female practitioners; and to save lives, both by the effect of better training and practice, but also by reducing infections introduced by male physicians who in their wider work came into contact with disease, surgery and post-mortems.

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