The Iron Rose: The Extraordinary Life of Charlotte Ross, MD

Nora D.S. Robins is Collections Co-ordinator (Internal) of the
University of Calgary Libraries.

By the 1850s women had begun to demand access to Canadian medical
schools, but until the 1880s virtually all female physicians practicing
in Canada had been trained as doctors in schools outside the country.
One of the few options open to Canadian women was to seek admittance to
the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. This is
exactly what Charlotte Ross chose to do.

She was born in England in 1843, the daughter of Joseph Whitehead, a
railway engineer. Brought to Canada at the age of five, she had a
conventional, middle-class childhood in Clinton, Ontario; she later
married David Ross, her father’s assistant, and settled in Montreal.

Ross’s interest in medicine was spurred, no doubt, by the early
deaths of her mother and brother, and the chronic, tubercular illness of
her sister. She showed such an aptitude for the subject that her family
physician lent her his medical texts. With the support of her husband
and Dr. Hingston, a prominent Montreal physician, Ross enrolled in
medical school in 1871, taking two of her three children with her. She
returned to Montreal each summer to fulfil her duties as wife and
mother. One consequence of this was an annual series of pregnancies and
miscarriages, and the birth of two more children. Ross was to have eight
children, the last when she was close to 50; her progress through
medical school was understandably slower than that of many of her
classmates.

Ross graduated in 1875 and in 1876 set up a practice in Montreal for
women and children. She was the first female physician in Quebec, and
was never licensed to practice. In 1881 she and the children joined her
husband in Whitemouth, Manitoba. For many years she was the only doctor
between Winnipeg and the Lakehead. Ross was not a champion of causes or
one to flout conventions. She was first and foremost a wife, mother,
daughter, sister. She had never intended to become a general
practitioner; she simply wanted to be able to minister to her family.

Fred Edge researched Charlotte’s life through her family records and
from interviews with her grandchildren. This biography, complete with
dialogue, reads like a novel. It is the interesting story of a
remarkable woman whose life deserves to be remembered.