Eliza Walker Dunbar

Eliza Walker Dunbar
Photograph of Dr Eliza Walker Dunbar (1898)
Born	Eliza Louisa Walker 1845 (1845) Bombay, India
Died	25 August 1925 (aged 79–80) Clifton, Bristol, England
Nationality	Scottish
Education	Cheltenham Ladies' College St. Mary's Dispensary for Women Frankfurt University of Zurich Vienna
Occupation	physician
Known for	one of the first female medical doctors in the UK
Medical career
Profession	Surgeon
Field	women and children's healthcare

Eliza Walker Dunbar (4 November 1845 – 25 August 1925) was a Scottish physician, one of the first women in the UK to be employed as a hospital doctor and the first to receive a UK medical licence by examination.

Early life and education

Eliza Louisa Walker was born in Balaram Street, Bombay, India in 1845. Her father, Alexander Walker, was a doctor from Edinburgh who worked for the Bombay Military Department. Her younger brother, Archibald Dunbar Walker, also trained in the medical profession.

Educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and then in Frankfurt Eliza was fluent in German, and had a keen interest in medicine. By 1867 she was studying medicine and receiving medical training in London at St Mary's Dispensary in Marylebone, run by Elizabeth Garrett. Walker's hope was that, like Garrett, she would be able to take the licentiate examination of the Society of Apothecaries and be accepted on to the medical register this way. However, the Society of Apothecaries then changed its rules in 1867 to exclude those who had not attended regular medical schools. Since no English medical school accepted women, this effectively excluded all female applicants.

Realising that she could not progress in the UK, Eliza Walker applied to study medicine at the University of Zurich. In 1867 the university had decided to allow women to take their degree there. In the summer of 1867 the Russian, Nadezhda Suslova, who had been attending lectures and studying medicine in Russia and Switzerland for several years, passed her qualifying examinations for the M.D. She defended her thesis and was awarded her doctorate in December 1867.

Eliza Walker studied at Zurich 1868-72, along with two other British women, Frances Elizabeth Morgan and Louisa Atkins. Eliza was the youngest of the group known as the 'Zurich Seven', who were the first women to gain a medical degree from the university. After studying there for four years, she submitted her thesis on blockages of the arteries of the brain (Ueber Verstopfung der Hirnarterien), receiving an MD with distinction in 1872. While at the university, she became the first woman assistant in the Zurich canton hospital's women's ward. She carried on to do a year's postgraduate study in Vienna, before returning to England in 1873.

Career

On her return to England in 1873, Dr Walker applied for and was appointed to the position of house surgeon at Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children. She was the only woman among thirteen candidates. The incumbent medical staff informed the hospital's managing committee that they would resign if she were appointed. When she did get the job, two staff immediately left. Five weeks later, a disagreement between Walker and another staff member led to the remainder of the doctors, all male, walking out. She remained in post for five more days, the only medical practitioner on site, before resigning to save the hospital further embarrassment.

Following her resignation, Dr Walker set up a private practice in Clifton, Bristol. In 1874 she added the family name Dunbar to that of Walker to become 'Walker Dunbar', although she was most commonly known as just 'Dr Dunbar' in later life. In Scotland it was common practice for people to use a maternal surname (e.g. the mother's maiden name) as a middle name. Given that her brother was called Archibald Dunbar Walker, it is most likely 'Dunbar' was taken from her mother's family.

In 1876 Dr Dunbar established the Read Dispensary for Women and Children in Hotwells, Bristol, with the help and support of Miss Lucy Read, a supporter of the women's movement in Bristol.

Dr Eliza L Walker Dunbar, c.1880

On 11 August 1876, Parliament passed the Medical Act 1876 (also known as the 1876 Enabling Act) allowing UK medical authorities to license qualified applicants regardless of gender. The King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland were the first UK authority to allow women who already had foreign degrees to take their licence examinations there from 1877. Dr Dunbar undertook the exam in Dublin on 10 January 1877, to become the first woman to receive a medical licence from a medical institution in the United Kingdom by examination. Her name was then added to the UK medical register. Dunbar was the second woman to be registered: Elizabeth Blackwell having been on the UK medical register since 1 January 1859. However, Blackwell had been registered under a clause of the Medical Act 1858 which permitted doctors with foreign degrees to register if they had practiced medicined in the UK prior to 1858. So no examination had been required.

Dr Dunbar held a number of roles in subsequent years, including medical officer for educational facilities in Bristol such as the Red Lodge Reformatory for Girls, the Bristol Training College of Elementary Teachers and the Department of Education (women) of Bristol University from its foundation.

7 Charlotte Street, Bristol. The second site of Dr Dunbar's Private Hospital for Women and Children, est. 1895

In 1892, Dr Walker Dunbar, along with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Dr Sarah Gray, attended the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Nottingham that year. There they lobbied successfully for the Association to remove its bar on the admission of women.

In 1895, Dr Dunbar established the Bristol Private Hospital for Women and Children at 34 Berkeley Square, Clifton, where she held the post of Senior Surgeon until her death. The site is now part of the School of Education at the University of Bristol. Originally the private hospital had space for 12 patients, and focused on the treatment of women by women. By 1914 the hospital had expanded to a second site, about 50 metres away, on 7 Charlotte Street.

In 1898 Eliza Dunbar was the only woman to get an entry in her own right in the 'Contemporary Biographies' section of a biographic encyclopaedia of Bristol. In 1906 she published an article in the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal on "The new theory and prophylactic treatment of puerperal eclampsia."

Dunbar continued her work until her death following a fall at her home, 9 Oakfield Rd in Bristol on 25 August 1925. On her death a colleague commented:

Dr Dunbar was essentially a pioneer, and to the end of her career she showed as outstanding qualities courage, perseverance and pluck. She gathered round her, and retained throughout her life, a devoted band of friends and supporters.

Political activism

Eliza Dunbar was involved in Bristol's female suffrage movement from its beginnings in the 1870s. She was a leading member of the Bristol Working Women's Union and one of the founders of the National Union of Working Women (NUWW), established in Bristol on the suggestion of the London trade unionist, Emma Paterson. Dunbar addressed the NUWW's first meeting on 3 August 1875. In 1878 she was one of the NUWW's three delegates to the Annual meeting of the Trades Union Congress, held that year at Bristol. There she argued that working women needed to proceed by:

seeking by combination with other women to obtain those ends which we believe to lie near our best interests. The weakest point of the Trades' Unions seems to me at present that there are comparatively few women who belong to them.

Dunbar participated in a number of conferences in Bristol in the late nineteenth century on 'Women workers', where she advocated positions that were more left-wing and more critical of social darwinist positions than most of the Bristol's elite female reformers. She was one of the few women in these groups who believed that socialism might bring about a better society, voting against a 1910 motion attacking the ideology. One of the purposes of the hospital Dr Dunbar founded in 1895 was to provide training opportunities for women doctors. As reported in The Englishwoman's Review, which was one of the first feminist journals:

It is not only a hospital for women patients, it is a hospital for the women doctors of Bristol, where they may have their patients under constant care, and under all the most favourable conditions, which for the majority of patients—even well-to-do patients—a hospital alone can afford.

At the time it was the only hospital outside of London for women and attended by a medical staff of women. Dunbar's hospital was managed by her colleague, Dr Emily Eberle. Although Dunbar was a Temperance supporter, she was critical of both teetotalism and the common tendency to blame the poor for their drinking habits, which was often cast as an inherited deficiency. She argued at a 1892 conference on 'The Temperance Question' that:

The dulness of the poor drives them to drink. How dull is the poor woman whose work for her family has no end and no relief of friendly aid! It is not so much drink she longs for as the contentment and cheerfulness which alcohol induces.

On evangelical teetotalism, she argued:

If you think that by drinking a little wine you will ruin the whole world, then, for God’s sake, don’t do it! But be tolerant to those who see no harm in moderation, and cannot agree that the abstinence of the few will cure the inebriety of the world.  

Legacy

Green Plaque at 9 Oakfield Road, Clifton, to honour the house of Eliza Walker Dunbar

Eliza Dunbar's death was recorded in a number of medical obituaries, including the British Medical Journal. The obituary for The Medical Women's Federation Newsletter said of her:

Dr. Dunbar was essentially a pioneer and a born fighter. Intrepid in thought and action she possessed, and retained to the end, high qualities of courage and enterprise. She was remarkably loyal and devoted to her old friends and patients, by whom also she was greatly beloved, and her sympathy and support were always forthcoming for the women's cause, to the advancement of which she herself so ably and fearlessly contributed.

A local medical journal added:

It is well to recall that the present advantage of freedom to work enjoyed by women are the direct fruit of the heroic struggles of those earlier determined spirits who, like Dr. Walker Dunbar, fought their way onward through obloquy and opposition. For many years Dr. Dunbar used to remove her brass plate at night lest morning should find it stolen or defaced!

After her death, Dr Dunbar's foundation was renamed the Walker Dunbar Hospital, retaining that name until the 1960s as a part of the Southmead General Hospital Group. By this time the main site of the much expanded hospital was on Clifton Down Road.

Despite being recognised as a pioneer in her lifetime, little was written about Dr Dunbar during the twentieth century. Even in 2000, her entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, noted merely that 'Biographical information is very sketchy on Eliza Walker.' The only known biographical source at that time was the 1925 obituary in The Medical Women's Federation Newsletter. This had been identified by the historian Thomas Bonner following his brief discussion of Walker in his 1989 article on the 'Zurich Seven' and other female medical pioneers. More became known with the publication of Mary Ann Elston's article on Dr Dunbar in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which drew on a wider range of printed sources. A growth in interest in women's history / gender history also resulted in Dunbar being discussed by historians in relation to her political and social activism.

In 2003 a plaque was added to Dunbar's house in Clifton in her honour by the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society. In 2023 the Bristol Post published two page article about Dunbar to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her appointment to the Bristol Children's Hospital.