Eva Josephine Jellett (8 April 1880 – 2 July 1955), doctor, was the first woman to graduate in medicine from Dublin University.
Early life and study
Jellett was born in Wellington Row to
John Hewitt Jellett
John Hewitt Jellett (25 December 1817 – 19 February 1888) was an Irish mathematician, priest, and academic who served as the 31st Provost of Trinity College Dublin from
He was also a priest in the Church of Ireland.
Early and personal lif ...
who was a clergyman, mathematician, and provost of
Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...
(TCD), and his wife and cousin Dorothea Charlotte Morris (1823–1911) who was from Tivoli, County Cork. Jellett was initially educated by governesses from Germany and later sent to Alexandra college. She was one of the early women students, matriculating in 1897, who attended courses in the
Catholic University of Ireland
The Catholic University of Ireland (CUI; ) was a private Catholic Church, Catholic university in Dublin, Ireland. It was founded in 1851 following the Synod of Thurles in 1850, and in response to the Queen's University of Ireland and its assoc ...
School of Medicine, St Cecilia St., Dublin.
She transferred to TCD in 1904 once women were permitted to attend that college. She graduated with her MB in September 1905 making her the university's first women graduate in medicine.
Her niece was the artist
Mainie Jellett
Mary Harriet Jellett (29 April 1897 – 16 February 1944) was an Irish painter whose ''Decoration'' (1923) was among the first abstract paintings shown in Ireland when it was exhibited at the Society of Dublin Painters Group Show in 1923. She w ...
.
Career
After working as a clinical clerk in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin, Jellet moved to India in 1906 to take up a position in the Dublin University Mission in Hazaribagh. Once she arrived in 1908 she was able to run the newly founded women's hospital, St Columba's Hospital for Women. In 1919 she was promoted to head associate giving her control over all the female staff in India. She stepped down as head in 1923 and returned in 1924 having spent almost all her time at that hospital. She spent one year, 1917, in the British military hospital in Bombay.
Death
After she retired, Jellet moved to
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
for some years before finally moving, c 1938, to
Gorran Haven
Gorran Haven () is a fishing village, in the civil parish of St Goran, on the south coast of Cornwall, England, UK. It is about south of Mevagissey and lies within the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
Overview
The vil ...
,
St Austell
Saint Austell (, ; ) is a town in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, south of Bodmin and west of the border with Devon.
At the 2021 Census in the United Kingdom, census it had a population of 20,900.
History
St Austell was a village centred ...
,
Cornwall
Cornwall (; or ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is also one of the Celtic nations and the homeland of the Cornish people. The county is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, ...
. It was there she died.
Further reading
* Thom, 1906
* Medical Directory, 1906–58
* Medical Register, 1906–58
* Light and Life: the Dublin University Missionary Magazine, ix, no. 6 (1917)
* K. W. S. Kennedy, Fifty years in Chota Nagpur (1939) Rosemary ffoliott, The Pooles of Mayfield (1955)
* R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952: an academic history (1982)
* John Fleetwood, The history of medicine in Ireland (1983)
* F. O. C. Meenan, Cecilia Street: the Catholic University School of Medicine 1855–1931 (1987)
* J. B. Lyons, ‘History of early women doctors’, Irish Medical Times: Women in medicine, special supplement (Jan. 1992), 38–40
* GRO (Ire. and UK)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jellett, Eva
19th-century births
1958 deaths
Alumni of Trinity College Dublin
Medical doctors from Dublin (city)
Irish women medical doctors