| Previous | Image 1 of 3 | Next |
 |
| The statue of Dr Margaret Cruickshank in Waimate where she ran a medical practice single-handed during World War 1. Photos from the Hocken collections. |
Women had been admitted to Otago University from the outset,
with the first graduating in Arts in 1885.
The speaker at her graduation ceremony, Dr William Brown,
made an eloquent plea for the entry of women to higher
education, including medicine.
The question of women entering Medical School had already
come before the Council in 1881, but no decision had been
thought necessary, because women were not eligible to
complete at Edinburgh.
It was a different matter once the full course was
established.
In 1891, just four years after the first man, William
Christie, graduated from the school, Emily Siedeberg entered
the medical course, followed the next year by Margaret
Cruickshank.
The year 1891 was far from a high point for the Otago Medical
School.
There were two debates in the June edition of the Review that
year, one on whether women should be admitted to the School
and the other on whether the School itself should close.
There is no reason to believe that the dean of the medical
school John Scott wanted to keep women out of medicine.
He had been a student at Edinburgh in 1870 at the peak of the
controversy and violence surrounding the admission of women
medical students there.
He would also have been aware that, in 1891, there were 25
women on the British medical register and that the medical
schools in Melbourne and Sydney both admitted women; indeed
the first two women graduated from Melbourne in 1891.
Furthermore, apart from the University's long-established
policy of admitting women, the serious shortage of medical
students provided a compelling reason to admit them to the
Otago course.
There had been only three graduates in 1890 and a mere dozen
since 1887.
Nevertheless, Scott's attitude to women in his classes gives
an impression of forbearance rather than enthusiasm.
Fourteen women graduated while he was dean of the school.
This was a small proportion of a small number of students and
within it the pattern of graduations was very uneven.
Siedeberg graduated in 1896 and Cruickshank in 1897, then
there was a gap until 1900, when four more women graduated,
the biggest group in the period.
Another three graduated together in 1904, but only one woman
was included among the graduates in 1902, 1903, 1906, 1910
and 1911.
There were none at all in the other eleven years.
A graduate of 1916 could justifiably describe the five women
in her first-year class as having " appeared at the college
just as the authorities thought the craze for women studying
medicine had gone".
The admission of women to the School was not generally
welcomed by staff, students or the local medical fraternity.
In the June 1891 issue of the Review, "Dunedin medico" asked
indignantly, "Why should a woman unsex herself by giving way
to a morbid craving which can only be likened to an epidemic
of insanity?"
While the early women students may not have had to face the
overt hostility that had greeted women at Edinburgh twenty
years earlier, the atmosphere in the School was chill.
The main concern of staff seems to have been how to combine
teaching with decorum, but there were also episodes of
ill-will.
At first, Professor Scott asked Emily Siedeberg to absent
herself from two of his anatomy classes.
However, after teaching her separately, he soon moved to
inclusive classes.
