Outlander's Clair Fraser has jumped from second world war nurse, to eighteenth century healer cum witch to surgeon and that's what's great about fiction but the real story of female doctors, in Britain at least, is one of profound struggle and individual persistence. 

When Charlotte Leadam, in my up coming novel Sinclair, a story based on the real Leadam family who lived and worked as apothecary surgeons in Tooley Street from the late 18th century to the mid nineteenth century, inherits her husband's apothecary shop she was not allowed to run the shop on her own account - only men were allowed to be licensed as apothecaries.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 – 1917) was the first woman in Britain who qualified as a physician and surgeon and she did this when in 1865, she finally obtained a licence (LSA) from the Society of Apothecaries.

Garrett's life's work was opening the medical profession to women. She started her quest by working as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital, In 1860 she attempted to enrol in the hospital's Medical School. She was not accepted but was allowed to attend private tuition in Latin, Greek and materia medica with the hospital's apothecary, while continuing her work as a nurse.

She employed a tutor to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. Eventually she was allowed into the dissecting room and the chemistry lectures.

Gradually, Garrett became an unwelcome presence among the male students, who in 1861 presented a memorial to the school against her admittance as a fellow student, despite the support she enjoyed from the administration.

She was obliged to leave the Middlesex Hospital but she did so with an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica.

Garrett then applied to several medical schools, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and the Royal College of Surgeons, all of which refused her admittance.

Having privately obtained a certificate in anatomy and physiology and in 1862, she was finally admitted by the Society of Apothecaries who, as a condition of their charter, could not legally exclude her on account of her sex.

She continued her battle to qualify by studying privately with various professors, including some at the University of St Andrews, the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and the London Hospital Medical School.

She co-founded the first hospital staffed by women, was the first female dean of a British medical school, the first female doctor of medicine in France.

She was the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, she was the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain.

Pictures: 1. Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) in Outlander Season Two Finale "Dragonfly in Amber"
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson