Women Medical Graduates and Mission Service

Abstract

In 1902, Ethel Ambrose, a young South Australian woman, took a significant step towards her goal of becoming a Christian missionary doctor when she graduated in Medicine from the University of Adelaide. Raised in a home where the Baptist faith was vigorously practised, she had taught Sunday school and prepared herself for matriculation at the Unley Park School. Enrolling in Medicine at the age of twenty-three, she was several years older than most commencing students as she had had to work as a teacher for some years to finance her studies. Ethel Ambrose was not the first woman in Australia to have enrolled in a medical degree with foreign mission service in mind and, with others, she represented the continuing aspirations of a small but ever-present group of women medical graduates. They were joined by other women who had decided on missionary service after having entered the medical profession, as well as those who left Australian as missionary wives with no official church recognition being given to the medical work they carried out in the service of the mission society. It is the purpose of this article to provide an analysis of a number of significant factors that had a bearing upon the professional lives of Australian women medical missionaries. The women considered