Eliza Walker

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 Walker continued to engage with Dorothea Beale and the college after she left, serving as one of the founding committee members of the Guild of Cheltenham Ladies' College when it was established in 1884.

After leaving Cheltenham, Eliza Walker studied at a private school in Frankfurt. 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. She carried on to do a year's postgraduate study in Vienna, before returning to England in 1873.

Career The surviving part of Bristol's Hospital for Sick Children (est. 1866) where Eliza Walker was appointed as House Surgeon in 1873. This part dates to 1885. On her return to England in 1873, Dr Walker applied for and was appointed to the position of House Surgeon at Bristol Hospital for Sick Children (est. 1866). This was located at that time in a converted dwelling house in Royal Fort, St Michael's Hill, on the south side of the Royal Fort Gatehouse. She was the only woman among thirteen candidates. After the walk-out, Walker remained in post for five more days, the only medical practitioner on site, before tendering her resignation on 25 July to save the hospital further embarrassment.

Following her resignation, Dr Walker set up a private practice in Clifton, Bristol. In December 1874 she added the family name Dunbar to that of Walker to become 'Walker Dunbar'. This was her maternal grandmother's maiden name. She was, however, most commonly known as just 'Dr Dunbar' in later life. This was on St. George's Road, initially open two days a week. Within a few years it had expanded significantly, attracting women from all over Bristol and beyond. By 1885 it was seeing c.1,800 patients per year. In October 1906 the dispensary moved to a larger, purpose built site, on St George's Road.

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 took the exam in Dublin on 10 January 1877, to become the first woman to qualify for a medical licence by examination from a UK medical institution. That a woman had been awarded a 'degree in medicine' was widely reported in the UK Press, this being the first time a woman had been awarded such a qualification by a UK institution. Dr Walker Dunbar's name was added to the UK medical register on 12 September 1877, along with Louisa Atkins, Frances Hogan and Sophia Jex-Blake, who also took their exams in Dublin that year. These were not the first women to be registered: Elizabeth Blackwell had 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 medicine 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 in 1892. She also acted in some teaching roles, lecturing at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1888 and delivering a course of lectures on Physiology at University College Bristol in 1890, funded by the Bristol and Clifton Branch of the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and Ireland. In addition, Dunbar ran courses at the newly established Redland High School for Girls on 'Hygiene' (1888) and 'Physical Training for Girls' (1891). Even for a school run on liberal lines, the latter course was considered 'a rather advanced subject to lecture on in those days'. School of Education, University of Bristol. Site of Dr Dunbar's hospital (est. 1895) at 34 Berkeley Square In August 1878, the Irish Graduates Association for medical practitioners, convening at the British Medical Association annual meeting in Bath, agreed to accept Eliza Walker Dunbar into their association. However, at the same meeting the BMA decided to expel women who had been recently been accepted as members, such as Frances Hogan, on the grounds that they had been 'illegally elected' and 'inadvertently admitted to the Association'. This decision was only reversed in 1892. That year, Dr Walker Dunbar, along with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Dr Sarah Gray, attended the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Nottingham. There they lobbied successfully for the BMA to remove its bar on the admission of women. In 1894 Dunbar, along with 40 other female doctors, were admitted into the BMA. She was one of two women to give papers at the BMA annual meeting held at Bristol that August, both in the 'Obstetrics and Gynaecology' section. alt=photo of a house, formerly a hospital 7 Charlotte Street, Bristol. The second site of Dr Dunbar's Private Hospital for Women and Children, est. 1895 223x223px In December 1895, Dr Dunbar opened the Bristol Private Hospital for Women and Children at 34 Berkeley Square, Clifton, realising 'the grand idea of her life'. She held the post of Senior Surgeon there until her death. Originally the private hospital had space for 12 patients, and focused on the treatment of women by women. The hospital was staffed by three female doctors, Walker-Dunbar, Marion S. Linton and Lilly A. Baker, all three of whom were also the chief medical attendants at the Read Dispensary. Both the hospital and the dispensary were supported by a combination of 'voluntary contributions and payment.'

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."

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. serving on the committee of the Bristol & West of England Society for Women's Suffrage from 1875. Chairing a suffrage meeting in October 1877, she linked the movement to the campaign to extend the franchise to male agricultural labourers, arguing that 'It was just that women be considered as a class, as long as men and women differ as to what were the true interests of women.'

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 in 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 organised 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...for this was the only hospital in England, outside London, for women, attended by a medical staff of women, and its value, therefore, was great, not only for the patients, but for the women doctors of Bristol. Dunbar's hospital was managed by her colleague, Dr Emily Eberle. 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! 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. More became known with the publication of Mary Ann Elston's short article on Dr Dunbar in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which drew on a wider range of printed sources.

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.