A College Born in Protest: 1929

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For most of the nineteenth century, obstetrics and gynecology existed in Britain as junior partners to general surgery and general medicine, their practitioners without a professional home of their own. Specialist societies had formed as early as the 1850s, but a full college, with the standing to set its own examinations and speak with its own authority, did not exist. That changed only after a deliberate campaign. William Blair-Bell and William Fletcher Shaw spent four years pressing the case against real institutional resistance before the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was finally founded in September 1929, with Blair-Bell as its first president. The Royal Charter that gave the College its full standing did not arrive until 1947, eighteen years later. The delay is itself the story: obstetrics and gynecology had to fight to be recognized as a specialty in its own right, at a time when the care of pregnant women was still widely treated as a lesser branch of surgery rather than a discipline demanding its own expertise.