She was the daughter of Newson Garrett, of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she was born in 1836, and the sister of Millicent Fawcett. Elizabeth was educated at home and at a private school. In 1860 she resolved to study medicine, an unheard-of thing for a woman in those days, regarded by some as almost indecent. Having obtained some more or less irregular instruction at the Middlesex hospital, London, she was refused admission as a full student both there and at many other medical schools to which she applied. Finally she studied anatomy privately at the London hospital, and with some of the professors at St Andrews University, and at the Edinburgh Extra-Mural school. She had no less difficulty in gaining a qualifying diploma to practise medicine. London University, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and many other examining bodies refused to admit her to their examinations; but in the end the Society of Apothecaries allowed her to enter for the Licence of Apothecaries' Hall, which she obtained in 1865.
In 1866 she was appointed general medical attendant to St Mary's dispensary, a London institution started to enable poor women to obtain medical help from qualified practitioners of their own sex. The dispensary soon developed into the New hospital for women, and there Dr Garrett worked for over twenty years. In 1870 she obtained the University of Paris degree of M.D. The same year she was elected to the first London School Board, at the head of the poll for Marylebone, and was also made one of the visiting physicians of the East London hospital for children; but the duties of these two positions she found to be incompatible with her principal work, and she soon resigned them.
In 1871 she married Mr James G.S.Anderson (d. 1907), a London shipowner, but did not give up her practice. She worked steadily at the development of the New hospital, and (from 1874) at the creation of a complete school of medicine in London for women. Both institutions have since been handsomely and suitably housed and equipped, the New hospital (in the Euston Road) being worked entirely by medical women, and the schools (in Hunter Street, WC) having over 200 students, most of them preparing for the medical degree of London University (the present-day University College London), which was opened to women in 1877. In 1897 Dr. Garrett-Anderson was elected president of the East Anglian branch of the British Medical Association. In 1908 she was elected mayor of Aldeburgh, the first woman mayor in the whole of England. The movement for the admission of women to the medical profession, of which Dr Anderson was the indefatigable pioneer in England, extended in her lifetime to every civilized country except Spain and Turkey. She died in 1917.
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