A Female Pioneer: Dr. Emily Stowe

Emily Howard Jennings Stowe (1831-1903) was the first Canadian woman to practise medicine in Canada. She was forced to seek her medical training in the United States because no Canadian medical schools would accept her. When she returned to Canada to practise medicine, she also became a crusader for women's rights. Stowe's medical career was quite different from her contemporary Sir William Osler. Stowe's life story illustrates the challenges that women faced in becoming physicians in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Emily Howard Jennings was born in 1831 in Norwich, Oxford County (about 150 kilometres southwest of Toronto). She was the eldest of six girls. Emily remained in school until the age of fifteen, when she began teaching in a small school nearby. She went on to earn a First Class Teacher's Certificate and even became principal of a Brantford public school. In 1856, Emily married John Stowe and over the next seven years gave birth to three children. For financial reasons, Emily returned to teaching when her husband developed tuberculosis and had to go into a sanitorium for treatment. At that time Emily decided to become a doctor. Perhaps because of her husband's illness, she became interested in medicine. Or perhaps she sought a more remunerative profession than teaching now that she was the family provider. In any case, denied access to Canadian medical schools, Emily entered the New York Medical College for Women in the United States.

In 1867, Dr. Emily Stowe returned to Canada and established a medical practice in Toronto. She hoped that in this large city she would find patients willing to be treated by a woman doctor, who specialized in the diseases of women and children. She was right. Patients indeed came. Despite having a medical degree, however, Stowe was refused a license from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. American-trained physicians were required to attend sessions at an Ontario medical school and then sit qualifying examinations. In Stowe's case, no Ontario medical schools admitted women, so she was unable to meet this requirement. Eventually, Stowe and another woman doctor, Jenny Trout, were admitted for courses at the Toronto School of Medicine in the early 1870s. Stowe finally received her Ontario medical license in 1880.

Because Stowe faced many obstacles and challenges in her efforts to study and practise medicine, she knew about inequality. Her personal experiences led her to become an adamant supporter of women's rights. She became a dedicated female suffrage campaigner. As her biographer Beacock Fryer states, "ultimately Emily Stowe the suffragist came to overshadow Emily Stowe the doctor." Stowe broke down important barriers for the next generation of women doctors. The first female doctor to graduate from a Canadian medical school (the Toronto Woman's Medical College) in 1883 was none other than Stowe's daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen. A second women's medical college was opened in Kingston, from which female doctors graduated the year after Stowe-Gullen. Attitudes towards women and medicine were slowly changing, largely due to Emily Stowe and other pioneering women doctors of the nineteenth century.