She practiced medicine in Toronto for years before Canada would license her to
Emily Stowe
Refused admission to Canadian medical schools for being a woman, Emily Stowe trained in the United States and practiced medicine in Toronto for over a decade before finally being licensed in Ontario in 1880.
.jpg)
Advertisement
Emily Stowe applied to study medicine at the University of Toronto in the 1860s and was refused admission specifically because she was a woman, a rejection that pushed her to study instead at the New York Medical College for Women, where she earned her medical degree in 1867. She returned to Toronto and began practicing medicine immediately, treating patients for over a decade before Ontario's medical licensing body would formally grant her a license to practice in 1880, making her the first woman to practice medicine in Canada, albeit initially without official sanction to do so.
Beyond medicine
Stowe used her prominence to push for broader change, co-founding the Toronto Women's Literary Club in 1876, an organization that functioned as an early vehicle for suffrage activism under a deliberately unthreatening name, and later helping found the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to earn a medical degree entirely within Canada, continuing her mother's work in both medicine and the women's suffrage movement that eventually secured Canadian women the federal vote.
Advertisement
Sources
Continue reading
The Boyd Gang
Edwin Alonzo Boyd's gang robbed banks across Toronto in the early 1950s and twice escaped the Don Jail,…
Mississauga
In 1975 it had 235,000 people. Under one mayor's 36-year tenure, it grew into Canada's sixth-largest city —…
Deer Park
Deer Park takes its name from an actual deer herd kept on a 19th-century estate near St. Clair and Yonge,…
Regent Park
Built starting in 1947 on land planners called one of Toronto's worst slums, Regent Park was Canada's first…