Lilian Helen Alexander
surgeon (1861-1934)
Lilian Helen Alexander (15 March 1861 – 18 October 1934) was an Australian surgeon and one of the first women to study medicine at the University of Melbourne.
Early life
Alexander was born in 1861 at St Kilda, Victoria to Jane and Thomas Alexander. Her father was an English-born printer and bookseller while her mother (Jane née Furnell) was an Irish-born school administrator. She attended Lawn House, the school run by her mother, and Presbyterian Ladies' College before enrolling at the University of Melbourne. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1886 and a Master of Arts in 1888 and was the first female student admitted to the university's Trinity College, "against considerable opposition", making her the first woman to be admitted to any Australian university's residential college. After graduating, Alexander worked as a schoolteacher at Ruyton Girls' School.
Medical career
In 1887, after she and Helen Sexton petitioned the university, Alexander became one of the first five women to be admitted to the University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine. She received her Bachelor of Medicine in 1893, becoming a qualified medical doctor, and completed her medical residency at the Royal Women's Hospital in Carlton.
Alexander was involved in the creation of the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women and Children, a hospital for women run by women doctors, and was one of the hospital's original staff members alongside Constance Stone and a number of other recent female medical graduates. Alexander specialised in surgery after gaining her Bachelor of Surgery in 1901, and worked at the Queen Victoria Hospital until 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lilian Helen Alexander” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.