In 2025, the year in which the Otago medical school celebrates 150 years, 50 per cent of graduates are women. Back in 1891 when Emily Siedeberg, who would go on to become the school’s first woman graduate, applied for entrance it was not at all clear that it would be granted. There was active hostility in many quarters to the very idea that women could be doctors. This book traces the paths of the women who, between the 1890s and 1967 (when the Auckland medical school opened), battled indifference and chauvinism and, later, many of the other challenges that faced women in the professions, to become New Zealand’s first women doctors.
