091322 140 year history - A4 landscape v1 digital - Flipbook - Page 34
1889
Medical Students
The School of Medicine at the University
of Sydney began accepting undergraduate
students in 1883. They were from quite
different social backgrounds, unlike
the wealthy university gentlemen of
previous decades. Many were Australian
born and came from middle-class and
working-class families – children of
schoolmasters, wheelwrights, mining
agents, stonecutters, accountants and
pharmacists. The curriculum was difficult
and in the first years fewer than half the
students graduated. Prince Alfred was
the first, and for a long time the only,
Clinical School for the university’s medical
students. The young men pictured here
with Professor Anderson Stuart, the
creator of the School, are the second ever
graduate class.
RPA Museum Image Collection
ca. 1900
Dissecting Room
Amongst the students here in the University’s dissecting room it is possible to pick out one woman.
Perhaps it is Dagmar Berne, the first woman to enrol in medicine in Australia. Dagmar Berne did
well in her first year but faced prejudices and did not complete the course, instead gaining her
qualifications in Scotland. Others were to follow her pioneering example and eventually two women
graduated from Sydney’s School of Medicine in 1902. But it was not until 1906 that Prince Alfred
Hospital would accept a woman graduate as a resident doctor. Her name was Jessie Aspinall.
Image provided by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians History of Medicine Library
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