Constance Stone

Emma Constance Stone (4 December 1856 – 29 December 1902) was the first woman to practice medicine in Australia. She played an important role in founding the Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne.

Stone was born in Hobart to William and Betsy Stone. She was forced to leave Australia to study medicine since the University of Melbourne would not admit women into the medicine course. She graduated from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and was awarded her MD from the University of Trinity College, Toronto. She went on to London where she worked in the New Hospital for Women and qualified as a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. It was her time at the New Hospital was her inspiration to one day found a hospital that was run 'by women, for women'.^[1]

In 1890 she became the first woman to be registered with the Medical Board of Victoria.^[2] Her sister Clara Stone followed her into medicine, she had been allowed to study in Australia and was one of two women who graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1891. Constance and Clara went into private practice together and both worked at the out-patients' dispensary in La Trobe Street.^[3]

In 1895, the first meeting of the Victorian Medical Women's Society convened in Constance's house, with Clara taking up the presidency. In September 1896 eleven of Melbourne's women doctors decided to found the Queen Victoria Hospital for women. Construction of the hospital was funded by a jubilee shilling fund appeal, it officially opened in July 1899.

Death

In 1902 she fell ill with tuberculosis and died on the 29th of December, aged 45. Her husband Dr David Egryn Jones, and daughter Bronwen, who also became a doctor, survived her.

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