A History of Britain 13. Victoria and her Sisters (20 of 29)

A History of Britain

In 1860, Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse at Middlesex Hospital, but her sights were set higher.
In between the swabs and the bedpans, she was looking carefully at surgical operations, and she was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom.
This improvised education made her bold enough to take the hospital's medical, not nursing exams, and when the time came to publish the results, one E Garrett had come top.
Ordered to keep the outrage secret, she went public instead.
Nine years later, the French gave her an MD.
And in 1874, the first medical college expressly for women was set up in London.
For Victoria, the mere idea of slips of girls looking at, much less cutting up the naked bodies of dead men was an unthinkable indecency.
But no doctor was of any help to her in the greatest crisis of her life.

For in 1861, the same year that Elizabeth Garrett cut her way into medicine, Albert contracted typhoid, which, after a few months of horrifyingly swift deterioration, ended in his death in December.
Everything in those last weeks became suddenly invested with an almost religious significance.
Here, for example, is the last book read to Albert, Scott's "Peveril of the Peak", and on the flyleaf the queen has written: "