17. Surgery in the 19th century was no place for women – though some enterprising females got around this institutional sexism in ingenious ways.
One reason why surgery was so risky was that the profession was made up of a small group of people – wealthy men. Women were all but excluded from almost all areas of medicine, but above all from surgery. Indeed, in England, the first female surgeon, a pioneer by the name of Louisa Aldrich Blake, only graduated from the London School of Medicine in 1877. This ‘macho’ approach to surgery undoubtedly cost countless lives. Many men reveled in being as tough, brutal and bloody as possible, even risking their patients lives for the sake of their own reputations.
Famously, one female surgeon found an unlikely way around this institutional sexism. Dr. James Barry was a respected British Army surgeon credited with saving numerous lives in field hospitals throughout the first half of the 19th century. Dr. Barry even rose through the ranks to become the Inspector General of Britain’s military hospitals. It was only after the skilled surgeon’s death in 1865 that the truth was revealed: Dr. Barry was actually a woman, born Margaret Ann Bulkley. They had lived as a man for several decades, deciding this was the only way to get into medical school and then into the field of surgery.