By Dr. Allan Marble
Prior to 1884, only two women in Nova Scotia practised medicine.
Martha Gray, wife of Rev. Archibald Gray and daughter of Dr. Michael Head, was listed as a physician in the 1827 census for Halifax. A sec-ond medical practitioner, known only as Madame d’Artis, advertised that she had established a medical practice in Halifax in 1840. She was listed as a female physician in Cunnabell’s City Directory for 1842 and had her medical office on Brunswick Street.
Both Martha Gray and Madame d’Artis practised prior to 1856, the year that the Medical Act was proclaimed and the Provincial Secretary began to record the qualifications of medical practitioners in a medical register. As a result, very little is known about the training and qualifications of Martha Gray and Madame d’Artis.
We know more about the training and qualifications of Dr. Maria Angwin. In 1884, she appeared at the office of the Registrar of the Provincial Medical Board in Halifax and presented her medical degree, which she had earned at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1882. She was 35.
Dr. Angwin grew up in Dartmouth, N.S. She graduated from the ladies’ academy of the Mount Allison Wesleyan Academy in Sackville, N.B., in 1869 and later from the Normal College in Truro, N.S. She taught school in Dartmouth for several years before deciding to pursue a medical degree. Because women were not accepted at medical schools in Canada until the late 1880s, Maria went to New York in 1879 and enrolled in the medical program at the Woman’s Medical College. Following her graduation, Dr. Angwin was hired as an assistant physician at the New England Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children in Boston. She returned to Dartmouth prior to August of 1883 and began to prepare for post-graduate training in England and in Ireland.
Prior to 1880, Dr. Daniel M. Parker was the only physician in Nova Scotia to have pursued post-graduate training abroad. He and his fellow practitioners were very likely impressed when informed that Dr. Angwin was going abroad to improve her qualifications. She spent the winter of 1883–84 abroad, first at the Royal Free Hospital in London and later at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. By the middle of the nine-teenth century the Rotunda Hospital, originally the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, was considered as the best maternity hospital in the western world.
Upon her return to Dartmouth in the spring of 1884, Dr. Angwin’s qualifications in obstetrics and gynecology were second to none. In May of 1885 she established a medical office at 11 Spring Garden Road, across the street from the present Central Library. She joined the Halifax Medical Society; the minutes of the society’s meetings show that she was a faithful attendee, taking part in discussions with her male counterparts.
Sadly, in April 1898, while continuing post-graduate training in Boston, Dr. Maria Angwin was stricken with erysipelas and died.
