The first psychiatric institute: how research and education changed practice

Physiology is a fascinating field for historians of gender and of women's place in science and medicine. In the United Kingdom at least, since the late nineteenth century, women's presence as undergraduate students in the field, as medical students and as subject specialists, has been relatively strong compared to their representation in science generally. A large body of public lectures and popular writing in "physiology" was produced by women for women from the 1860s onwards. Much of this would now be labelled as health education or even sex education and dissociated from the academic discipline of physiology and its inseparable partner in Britain, the Physiological Society. Victorian women's exposure to academic physiology was controversial because of the subject's association with animal experimentation. This modest volume is not directly about these broader issues although it does allude to them. Its main purpose is to celebrate the far from modest achievement of a small number of distinguished women physiologists. In the first section, E M Tansey provides a succinct overview of the history of women in the Physiological Society, noting that their admission, in 1915, was controversial, notwithstanding their publication record. Women's presence at the Society's dinners was clearly not welcome to all leading male physiologists of the time, yet they were accepted into the Physiological Society long before many other scientific societies. Section II gives brief biographies and edited extracts from published research for eight women whose contribution to science led to their becoming Dames of the British Empire or Fellows of the Royal Society. Section III provides biographical sketches of others whose distinguished scientific contribution did not attract such public honours. The Afterword raises the questions any analytic historian would ask about any patterns in background, career paths, topic research etc. but has to admit that the small sample precludes satisfying answers. It also attempts comparisons with the current situation of women physiologists. Again, the focus on a few very distinguished women is not necessarily the best foundation for such comparisons. The book achieves its main aims of documenting the achievements of the few well, although, as often seems to be the case, these successful women scientists frustrate the historian by not generally indulging in extensive reflection on their own lives. One would hope that it will encourage others to extend the study of women's place in physiology in and outside academia to answer the broader questions it poses more satisfactorily.