Eleanor Davies-Colley

Eleanor Davies-Colley FRCS (21 August 1874 – 10 December 1934) was a British surgeon. Among the earliest women in the UK to pursue a career in surgery, at that time an almost entirely male-dominated profession, she was also the co-founder of the South London Hospital for Women and Children.

Early life Born at Petworth in Sussex, her father, John Neville Colley Davies-Colley, was a surgeon at Guy's Hospital; her maternal grandfather, Thomas Turner, was also treasurer of that hospital. Her elder sister was the painter Frances Baker, and the feminist and publisher Harriet Weaver was her cousin. She studied at Baker Street High School for Girls and Queen's College, London. After leaving school, she at first worked with poor children in London's East End.

Davies-Colley's career as a surgeon spanned almost thirty years. She then became demonstrator in anatomy at the London School of Medicine and surgical registrar at the Royal Free Hospital. In addition to her work at the South London Hospital, in later life she was also a surgeon at the Marie Curie Cancer Hospital and senior obstetrician at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. Aided by her cousin Harriet Weaver and other feminists, enough money was raised to open an outpatients' department in Newington Causeway in 1912. A purpose-built eighty-bed hospital on Clapham Common, staffed entirely by women, was opened by Queen Mary on 4 July 1916. It was unusual in retaining the women-only staffing policy, initiated by Davies-Colley and Chadburn, right up until closure.

Death and legacy Davies-Colley died suddenly of thyroid toxaemia in London in 1934. A major fundraising drive (led by another pioneering woman surgeon, Averil Mansfield, the first woman to become a professor of surgery in the UK) raised nearly a quarter of a million pounds for the project. The lecture theatre contains a visual representation featuring Eleanor Davies-Colley and other pioneering female surgeons.