Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

Every British medical school refused her, so Garrett Anderson took a post as a hospital nurse and attended the students' lectures until the students complained and she was removed. She then found that the Society of Apothecaries had no rule excluding women, studied privately with tutors who would take her money, passed the examination in 1865 and obtained a licence to practise. The Society changed its rules immediately afterwards to prevent anyone repeating it.

She opened a dispensary for women and children in London that grew into a hospital, taught herself enough French to take a Paris medical degree that Britain would not recognise, and in 1876 an act finally allowed British bodies to license women — a change she had spent a decade making unavoidable. She was later the first woman dean of a British medical school and, in retirement in Aldeburgh, the first woman mayor in England. Her sister Millicent led the constitutional wing of the suffrage movement. She is buried in the churchyard at Aldeburgh, by the sea she had returned to.