About

Thank you for visiting my blog. Most of my career was spent in healthcare and although I have done other things since , it remains my first love. I was a Medical Laboratory Scientist for nearly ten years then a nurse and nurse teacher for almost fifteen years, working in Dundee, Glasgow and London.

I am passionate about examining history from the ‘bottom up’ since so often we only have accounts from the rich and powerful.

Women are frequently invisible or are added only as an afterthought. With this in mind, I have been researching the history of women in health care in Scotland for the last three and a half years. My original intention was to publish a book but Covid -19 intervened and almost all libraries and archives were closed for a considerable period. Having somewhat lost the impetus to try to get published, I have decided to publish the material online instead. It is more important to have these women’s voices heard and their experience recognised, than to persist in embarking upon a vanity project that may lead nowhere.

There are three distinct themes in which I am interested. These are

1. The links between early women doctors and the women’s suffrage campaign in Scotland.
2. The work of Redlands Hospital in Glasgow, Bruntsfield Hospital in Edinburgh, the Women’s Hospital in Dundee and the Samaritan Hospital in Glasgow. The first three were for women and staffed by women, the Samaritan Hospital was for women but included men on the staff. Redlands, Bruntsfield Hospital (Created by the merger of the Edinburgh Provident Dispensary for Women and Children founded by Sophia Jex-Blake, and The Hospice, founded by Elsie Inglis) and Dundee Women’s Hospital all had very strong connections to the suffrage movement.
3. The third theme relates mainly to some of the later women in medicine and nursing but not exclusively. It is largely unrelated to the first two but it is extremely relevant today, given the horrors proposed by the impending Nationality and Borders Bill currently being debated in parliament. I want to look at the ways in which immigrant and refugee women have contributed to the quality and advancement of healthcare in Scotland.

I hope that you enjoy reading about some of these remarkable women, some of whom I hope, will be entirely new to you. Should you have further information, photographs or personal connections to any of them, I would love to hear from you.

By the nature of these blog posts, they are relatively short (though not as short as some) so I have added links to further reading and resources.

Thank you for reading this far!

Beverly McFarlane.