The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of intense change within the medical profession; they signified the moment when ‘old-style medicine was dying and the modern medical profession was emerging’ (Darby 2007: xx). As Arthur Conan Doyle notes in 1910: ‘this generation has, as it seems to me, brought about a greater change in medical science than any century has done before’ (1910: 105). Medical modernity – that ‘greater change’ in medicine described by Conan Doyle – was not limited to new medical technologies and scientific discoveries: late nineteenth-century medical modernity also involved a reworking of notions of gender, epitomised in the debates regarding female doctors.

The history of female doctors in Britain is a fairly recent one, and it is bound up with the history of women gaining access to higher education, as part of the wider fight for women's rights in the nineteenth century. Although women were at last accepted into the clinical hospital as trained nurses, the entry into this medical sphere as doctors proved more difficult. While William Ernest Henley described the transformation of nursing in his 1877 collection In Hospital, he left out any mention of the struggles of female doctors in the late nineteenth century. A few years later, however, the poet Constance Naden pictures this modern phenomenon in ‘The Lady Doctor’ (1881), describing the figure as a ‘spinster gaunt and grey’ with a stern aspect:

Naden's woman doctor was once a blooming young woman, who threw off her young gentleman ‘[t]o be a Lady Doctor’, now valuing men as ‘neither patients for advice / Nor subjects for dissection’ (83). While Nightingale's New Style nurse was configured as especially feminine, the female or later New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Entering universities and clinics, it was argued both in public discourse and among many medical professionals, would desensitise women to suffering, thereby ‘unsexing’ them. Indeed, Naden's unmarried woman ‘seems a man in woman's clothes, / All female graces slighting’ (84), secretly longing for the love she once declined.