Partner Louisa Martindale

Queer Places:
Grosvenor House, 100–102 Beverley Rd, Hull HU3 1YA, UK
All Saints Churchyard, Kingston upon Hull, Kingston upon Hull Unitary Authority, East Riding of Yorkshire, England

Mary Charlotte "Murdie" Murdoch (September 26, 1864 – March 20, 1916) was born on 26 September 1864 in Elgin, Scotland, the youngest child of six born to Jane, née Macdonald, and solicitor William Murdoch. Two of her siblings included William and Henry Todd Murdoch. Educated initially by governesses, she attended Weston House School in Elgin, Manor Mount Girls' Collegiate School in south London, and received further tuition in Lausanne, Switzerland. She subsequently returned to Elgin to care for her widowed and invalided mother, following whose death in 1887 Murdoch discovered what she regarded as the "love of her life": medicine. Her ambition was warmly encouraged by the family doctor, Dr. Adams. Funded by an inheritance left by her mother, she studied at the London School of Medicine for Women—where she also served as curator of the museum—completed a midwifery course at the Maternity Hospital in Brighton, and officially qualified in Scotland in 1892.

After beginning her professional career with clinical assistant roles in London, Murdoch moved to Kingston upon Hull in 1893 to serve as house-surgeon at the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, which had opened two years previously on Park Street. In 1894, she joined the British Medical Association and became a member of the Association of Registered Medical Women. Following a period of personal illness and brief work at the Tottenham Fever Hospital in London during 1895, she returned to Hull in 1896 to become the city's first female general practitioner. In Hull, she built a respected private practice and, in 1900, employed the newly qualified doctor Louisa Martindale as her assistant. They worked closely together not just as business partners; in 1902, they went on a cycling holiday together visiting Vienna, Berlin, and Switzerland. They remained in partnership until 1906, and Martindale later dedicated an entire chapter to their life together in her biography. Beyond her private practice, Murdoch advanced to honorary senior physician at the Victoria Hospital for Children and gained renown as a skilled diagnostician and researcher.

Deeply committed to the feminist movement, Murdoch became a prominent, fearless public speaker for women's suffrage and social reform. In 1904, she founded the Hull Women's Suffrage Society as a branch of Millicent Fawcett's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). However, she later fell out with the group when the national body decided not to support militant methods by any campaigner, leading Murdoch to align with the more militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Despite this ideological split, she remained well-regarded by Millicent Fawcett, and the two stayed friends; in 1911, Murdoch was even chosen as Fawcett's representative at the International Council of Women in Stockholm. Known for her radical views and public opinions, she was also famously the first woman in Hull to own a car, which she drove with notable speed. In one famous anecdote, six men had to physically put her car back on the road after she rolled backwards down a hill and the vehicle caught fire, an incident over which Murdoch lightheartedly joked with her passenger.

Dr. Murdoch's personal life and professional network heavily intersected with other pioneering early women doctors of the era who shared similar personal lives, as she identified as a lesbian and maintained a lifelong association with Louisa Martindale. Her network also included Dr. Mabel Jones, who had worked under Dr. Murdoch in Hull just before moving on to Brighton and Hove, where she partnered with Dr. Helen Boyle. Dr. Helen Boyle, recognized as the founder of mental healthcare in Sussex, engaged in a series of relationships with women that included both Dr. Mabel Jones and Dr. Mary Murdoch.

Dr. Murdoch formally joined the Church of England in 1914. She passed away at her home in Hull on 20 March 1916 at the age of 51, after returning through heavy snow from visiting an emergency patient. Her large funeral procession—which attracted thousands of mourners and was led fittingly by her own automobile—drew immense local grief, after which she was cremated and her urn placed inside the Lady Chapel of All Saints Church in Hull. Her memorial inscription remembers her as "A great Physician and Fearless Reformer who practised in this city from 1891-1916 leading a life of courage, self sacrifice and heroic devotion," and memorial plaques were subsequently placed on her former home on Beverley Road and on the former Victoria Hospital.

Murdoch's remarkable legacy and career were the subject of a 1919 biography titled A woman doctor: Mary Murdoch of Hull by Hope Malleson. The appendix of this book quotes an address she gave to students of the London School of Medicine for Women in 1904, in which she expressed her dream of a future where it would be seen as "one of the barbarisms of a past age that a medical man should ever have attended a woman." Decades later, in March 2021, a new footbridge connecting Hull city center to the Princes Quay waterfront, marina, and fruit market over the Castle Street dual carriageway was opened and named "Murdoch's Connection," a name nominated by pupils from the Newland School for Girls in honor of the city's first female GP.

References:


Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920 Paperback – June 1, 2019
by Ann Oakley

Other references:

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