Alice Woodward Horsley

Alice Woodward Horsley (née Woodward; 3 February 1871 – 7 November 1957) was a New Zealand medical doctor and the first woman to be a registered medical doctor in Auckland.

Early life and education Horsley was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 3 February 1871, to Laura née Young, a schoolteacher, and William Woodward, a farmer who had also been a teacher. Horsley left school and 13 and was educated at home after that. After extra tuition from friends of the family in Latin and chemistry, she was able to enrol to study medicine in 1894 at the University of Otago. She was the first woman doctor registered in Auckland and the first woman employed at Auckland Hospital, where she held a position as honorary bacteriologist and pathologist, until Constance Frost was appointed.

From 1936 to 1946, she was an anaesthetist at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, and worked privately for surgeons including Sir Carrick Robertson and James Hardie Neil. Horsley worked throughout the plague scare of 1900 and the 1918 influenza epidemic, and was a member of the medical relief team after the Hawke's Bay earthquake of 1931, in which hundreds were killed and thousands injured. In 2017, Horsley was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's 150 women in 150 words, celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.