Greetings my dear friends

I want to address you on the subject of women. After my wooden doors are closed each evening at 5pm, unless of course I am invited as the guest of honour to some nearby dinner, I often browse the UCL website. Whilst doing this not long ago, I noticed an item about the new UCL mentoring scheme for women in the Biomedical Sciences, and I thought I could not let slip the opportunity of sharing with you my thoughts on women.

I knew some very interesting women, who seemed to overcome all the many obstacles the early nineteenth-century world set in their way. I would like to take the liberty of mentioning a few of my dear friends, all of them blue-stockings and feminists, although we did not use the term then. They all read my work, and I like to think that my role in their life was as a mentor, as well as a friend. Harriet Grote, for instance, was known in her time as the queen of the radicals, and later in life supported the reform of the married woman’s property law and the extension of the suffrage to women. She fought with Sarah Austin for my attention. Sarah Austin was a talented writer and the best translator in England, who worked for me on occasion, and called me dearest grandpapa. And Frances Wright, the writer and traveller, set up a community in America, and fought for social justice for black people and for women. She stayed in my house for a while, and my young assistants adored her. In fact she so dominated my household that I found it hard to work my customary long hours each day. Finally I had to write secretly to General Lafayette to ask him to persuade her to visit him in Paris (they were very close). And lastly Anna Wheeler, who with my friend, and sometime house-guest, William Thompson, wrote An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, in which she rather got at my friend James Mill, who had excluded women from suffrage in his Essay on Government. I, in principle, supported female suffrage, and Anna Wheeler knew this, but I was prepared to omit them from my Plan of Parliamentary Reform to enhance the chances of parliament accepting my proposal for universal manhood suffrage. I also met her two charming daughters in Paris in 1825, and they accompanied me to the studio of the artist, Pierre Jean David, who was sculpting my bust in marble (now in the London University Senate House Library by the way, but I digress …). I think I may say with truth that these women were remarkable. And all of them now have entries in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which I also browse from time to time. I am very proud of them.

Slightly nearer home, my dear sister-in-law Mary Sophia was the daughter of the physician and chemist George Fordyce. She wrote up his experiments, and later on performed and discussed chemical experiments with my brother Samuel. She was also a mother of five and an accomplished botanist. It was her father’s work and lectures that first led me to make a will leaving my body to the furtherance of medical science. I lived so long of course, it was not George Fordyce that dissected me, but Richard Grainger at the Webb Street School of Anatomy. I hope the process was useful.

Of course I was always in favour of education for girls. I included girls in the plans for my Chrestomathic School. (I will take the liberty of mentioning that I coined the word Chrestomathia to mean useful learning.) This school was to have a curriculum dominated by science and technology, subjects of use to pupils who were to seek employment in the industry and commerce of London. Subjects, I hoped, useful to both sexes. At school and at university I was taught useless subjects such as theology, Latin, and Greek. Pupils at my Chrestomathic School would have received an education to fit them for life. The school was to have been built in the large garden attached to my house in Westminster, but I had misgivings and withdrew the offer. Would the pupils be noisy? Would I have any privacy? I am sorry now, of course, because that sort of education would have been very useful.

However, as earlier blog readers will know, although I was not a prime mover in the establishment of London University, soon after University College London, my ideas inspired the founders, and a curriculum that included the sciences, liberal arts, and modern languages, was one of my fervent wishes. I flatter myself that in a small way I sowed the seeds that would lead to the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences. I see from my plans for the curriculum for the Chrestomathic School that I proposed among the sciences physiology, anatomy, pathology, nosology, diaetetics, prophylactics, zohygiantics, and phthiosozoics! I hardly know what some of them are now. And I had to ask to be sure I knew what Biomedical Sciences are!

I understand from the UCL website that the mentoring scheme for women in the Biomedical Sciences is concentrating on recruitment, retention, and promotion, all areas where women may need help in what may be perceived as a male-dominated environment. And of course these days women have to balance their work with their families and relationships: and no woman should have to sacrifice femininity and motherhood for her career. I think the plan to help female scientists reach their potential is a good scheme. I hope all the mentees succeed, and like my female friends above, they all get an entry in the ODNB.

I will not let the opportunity slip without just mentioning that I too mentored my secretaries, or amanuenses as I termed them. I encouraged them and helped them: two became judges, another a successful journalist, and another a vicar (I don’t know how that happened, but yet again I digress …). Mentors who advise, support, encourage, suggest, and clarify, provide a valuable service, and I wish them every success too.

I wish mentors and mentees well, and look forward to hearing how the scheme progresses.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant

J.B.