Frances Hoggan

Frances Elizabeth Hoggan MD (née Morgan) (20 December 1843 – 5 February 1927) was the first British woman to receive a doctorate in medicine from a university in Europe, and the first female doctor to be registered in Wales.

Frances Hoggan was born in Brecon, Wales, where her father, Richard Morgan, was a curate. She was brought up and educated at Cowbridge in Glamorgan and later at Windsor. During her teens, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, who was brought up with her mother and passed off as Frances' sister.^[1] She went on to study at Paris and Düsseldorf. She obtained her medical qualification from the University of Zurich in 1870, completing the six-year course in three years. In 1874 she married Dr George Hoggan. She later practised in London as a specialist in women's and children's diseases, including a period at North London Collegiate School. Together with her husband, she opened the first husband-and-wife general medical practice in the UK. She became a campaigner and social reformer, and toured the United States lecturing. She had a particular interest in racial issues, and was a speaker at the Universal Race Congress in London in 1911.

Her cremated remains are buried, with her husband's, in Woking cemetery.

Education

Upon the Council of Apothecaries Hall's 1867 exclusion of women from its professional exams, Frances Elizabeth Morgan sought her medical education at the University of Zurich, whence Russia's first woman physician had received her degree in the same year. There, Morgan successfully wrote and defended a thesis on muscular dystrophy. Afterwards, at a clinic in Vienna she undertook study on operative midwifery and became a pupil of surgeon Gustav Braun.^[2]

Works

• Education for Girls in Wales (1882)
• American Negro Women During Their First Fifty Years of Freedom (1913)

See also

• Elizabeth Blackwell
• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
• Nadezhda Suslova

Sources

• M. A. Elston, "Hoggan, Frances Elizabeth (1843–1927)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 4 May 2007
• McIntyre, N. "Britain's first medical marriage: Frances Morgan (1843–1927), George Hoggan (1837–1891) and the mysterious "Elsie"." Journal of Medical Biography, 12:2 (2004), 105–14. Publisher: Royal Society of Medicine. ISSN 0967-7720.

Notes

External links

• Biography at BBC Wales