Google Doodle featured a special doodle honoring Doctor Louisa Aldrich-Blake, a British woman who was the first to enter the world of medicine and is considered among the first ever female surgeon, as well as one of the first people to perform surgery on rectal and cervical cancers.
The doodle was featured to celebrate Aldrich-Blake’s would be 154th birthday, celebrated on Thursday, August 15, 2019.
fter having graduated in 1894 from the London School of Medicine for Women with a Bachelors of Science, Bachelors of Medicine and a Medical Degree, she went on to study and graduate from the University of London with a masters in surgery.
Dr. Aldrich-Blake’s began working at the New Hospital for Women and Children in London, becoming the lead surgeon while simultaneously working at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Dr. Aldrich-Blake was the first woman to hold the post of surgical registrar in 1895 and also acted as an anesthetist.
During the First World War, in the absence of many male doctors who were deployed, Dr. Aldrich-Blake assisted military hospitals between 1914-1916, specifically in France. Her patients nicknamed her “Madame la Générale.”
Besides urging dozens of women to volunteer for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Dr. Aldrich-Blake was the first to perform operations for cervical and rectal cancers, as well as leding the British surgeons in taking on the Wertheim operation for carcinoma of the cervix.
Dr. Aldrich-Blake died in December 1925 from cancer, and in the year of her death was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, also known as The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
SOURCE: JPOST
