The Disappearance of Sophia Frances Hickman, MD

By the start of the twentieth century, forty years after she first came into existence, the woman doctor was no longer a novelty, to be mocked or dreaded by patients and the profession alike. Women’s ‘fitness’ to practise had, indeed, been proven by the early Edwardian period. One August afternoon in 1903, Sophia Frances Hickman, a recently qualified graduate of the London School of Medicine for Women, walked out of the Royal Free Hospital and vanished. She had only just begun her locum position there and her disappearance was entirely out of character for such a stellar, prize-winning professional. Between August and October of 1903, Hickman’s disappearance was hotly debated in the lay and medical press alike. While the capabilities of the woman doctor became, once again, a subject for discussion, Sophia Frances Hickman found surprising defenders in members of her own profession, only too aware of the pressures placed on young practitioners.