Mabel Lida Ramsay

Mabel Lida Ramsay was born in London in 1878, the daughter of Paymaster-in-Chief A. J. Ramsay. As a young girl she expressed the desire to become a surgeon, an ambition not easy of accomplishment by a woman in those days. However, having decided on the career she wished to pursue, she studied at the Medical College for Women, Edinburgh, and at Owens College, Manchester, but before enrolling as a medical student she trained for two years as a gymnast, with the idea that such training would help her in the orthopaedic work in which, at first, she planned to specialize. She graduated M.B., Ch.B. at Edinburgh in 1906, took the Cambridge D.P.H. in 1908, and proceeded to the M.D. two years later.

In May 1921 she was elected a Fellow of The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and in 1929 was admitted a foundation Member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

She held the appointments of house-surgeon at the Glasgow Maternity Hospital and then for a time was in the public health service as assistant medical officer of health at Huddersfield. Later, she was senior house-surgeon at the Women and Children's Hospital, Leeds. She went to Plymouth a few years before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which she worked for a time as a surgeon with the Women's Imperial Service at hospitals in Belgium and France.

It was as an obstetrician and gynaecologist that Mabel Ramsay came to specialize and not as an orthopaedic surgeon. At Plymouth she became in due course consulting gynaecologist to the City Hospital and to the Infirmary; consulting obstetrician to the Three Towns Maternity Home, to the Salvation Army Maternity Home, and to the counties of Devon and Cornwall; and consulting surgeon to Plymouth Public Dispensary. She also lectured to midwives in the district and examined for the Royal College of Nursing.

For many years she was a familiar figure at the headquarters of the British Medical Association. She served on the old Insurance Acts Committee from 1919 to 1938, on the Additional Benefits Subcommittee from 1928 to 1938, and on a number of other committees, including the one concerned with the causation of puerperal morbidity and mortality. When the Association held its Annual Meeting at Plymouth in 1938 she acted as one of the vice-presidents of the Section of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. A founder member of the Medical Women's Federation, she had been its honorary secretary and in 1932-3 and again in 1933-4 its president. In 1934 she offered herself for election to the General Medical Council as a direct representative in the place of Sir Henry Brackenbury, whose term of office had expired; but the opposition was too strong. Locally, she was the first woman member of the Plymouth Medical Society and its president in 1930-1, and for a time she was honorary treasurer of the Plymouth Panel Committee and honorary secretary of the Plymouth Local Medical Committee. She was also a former honorary secretary of the Plymouth Citizens' Association and a past president of the Plymouth Soroptimist Club.

Mabel Ramsay's life was spent in one long fight for the rights of women. Recalling the days of the suffragettes, she could tell how her mother, then over 60 years of age, was one of the band of pilgrims who walked from Land's End to London in 1914. Dr. Ramsay herself accompanied the pilgrimage as far as Taunton, but then had to return to Plymouth to fulfil her professional duties. She loved to recall the excitement caused in those early days by the suffragettes, and with relish she would relate how once it had been said of her, " Dr. Mabel Ramsay is a devil: we must watch her." She was certainly watched, and admired, for many years thereafter.

Mabel Ramsay died while attending a council meeting of the Medical Women's Federation at Sheffield on May 9 1954. She was 75 years of age.