Nadezhda Suslova

Nadezhda Prokofyevna Suslova, born in 1843 and dying in 1918, was the first Russian woman to earn a doctorate of medicine. Born to a family of former serfs who gave their daughters a proper education, she attended classes at the Imperial Military Medical Academy and later studied at the University of Zurich after women were barred from Russian universities. She wrote her dissertation on the muscular reflexes of frogs in Ivan Sechenov's laboratory and graduated in 1867. After passing a special examination in 1868 she practiced gynecology and pediatrics in St. Petersburg, studied public health in the city's slums with her husband, and later worked in Nizhny Novgorod and Alushta, where she gave free care to poor local people and built a library and school.