Louisa Aldrich-Blake: The First Woman Master of Surgery

2025 sees a double anniversary for Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake, the first woman to achieve a Master of Surgery (M.S.) - it is 160 years since her birth and a centenary since her death. This event will celebrate the life, career, and legacy of this fascinating woman surgeon. From the award of the first M.S. in 1895, Dame Aldrich-Blake amassed a series of pioneering achievements, including the first woman surgical registrar at the Royal Free Hospital in 1896 and, in 1919, the first female consulting surgeon at the same institution. She also became Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women in 1914; a post she held until her death.

Professor Claire Brock (University of Leicester) will give a talk entitled 'Never Failed Anyone: The Surgical Patients of Louisa Aldrich-Blake’. This will explore Aldrich-Blake’s encounters with patients at the Royal Free, focusing on her surviving case notes from the Great War, when she treated men as well as women. Professor Brock will consider the value of patient records as a key archival resource and the importance of Aldrich-Blake’s career for future generations of medical women, as well as her vital contribution to the history of empathic healthcare.

This special event follows on from the 150th anniversary of the founding of the London School of Medicine for Women held in October 2024. It is also the culmination of a collaboration between Professor Brock, the Pascal Theatre Company, and The London Archives, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/X004732/1].

About the speaker:

Professor Claire Brock is an historian of surgery, and holds a Chair in Health Humanities and the Modern History of Medicine at the University of Leicester.

She completed a Wellcome-Trust funded project on women surgeons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, published as British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and a four-volume collection of primary sources: Women in Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2024). Recent work includes articles on the history of cleft palate surgery, and on the child surgical patient in the early twentieth century. She is currently researching a book entitled Surgery at Home 1880-1930, which reconsiders, via patient experiences, the domestic space as a location for surgery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.