The iconic Gladstone bag, which became synonymous with the traditional doctors’ bag was invented in London by a leather case maker named Edward Cole in the late 19^th Century. It was named after William Gladstone who was the prime minister of Great Britain 4 times between 1868 and 1894.

During the Victorian era, Medicine was a very male dominant profession, as women were not even permitted to go to medical school until 1876, let alone practice as Doctors.

Until the late 1800s the focus of girls’ education was towards their role as wives and mothers. Skills such as how to make delicate conversation, sew or manage servants were taught to the rich, whereas most of the poor had little access to schooling and literacy rates in lower social classes were low.

Universities were open only to men and even when they started to accept a small number of women, the ladies had to seek permission to attend lectures and were not awarded degrees. Medicine was one of the last professions in the UK to permit women to enter.

By 1900 there were 200 female doctors practicing in the UK. This number grew gradually, although strong opposition and negative attitudes to their pursuit of education and training in the medical profession remained.

In 1905 Dr Van Dyke, the president of the Oregon State Medical Society, stated, “Hard study killed sexual desire in women, took away their beauty, brought on hysteria, neurasthenia, dyspepsia, astigmatism and dysmenorrhea. Educated women could not bear children with ease because study arrested the development of the pelvis at the same time it increased the size of the child’s brain and therefore its head. This caused extensive suffering in childbirth”

Despite this attitude, numbers of female medical trainees in Britain increased during the First and Second World Wars due to the necessity of men to leave the country to fight. However, there was still much gender discrimination in selection for medical school places and “marriage bars” were commonplace meaning that women could be asked to resign from professions once they married or became pregnant. Even by 1975 it was still perfectly legal to employ a man instead of a woman, for no other reason than their gender.

Thankfully, in the 1970s The Women’s Liberation Movement and The Sex Discrimination Act, began to level the playing field. Women could no longer be asked to resign if they married, and applications to medical schools were considered on a formalized basis of merit rather than social class or gender.

Today, over half of medical students and two thirds of GP trainees are female.