[1] The daughter of a surgeon, Beale was a prominent suffragist, who promoted the teaching of science and German to girls, over the humanities and Latin.

[1] By 1867 she was studying medicine and receiving medical training in London at St Mary's Dispensary in Marylebone, run by Elizabeth Garrett.

[2] Walker's hope was that, like Garrett, she would be able to take the licentiate examination of the Society of Apothecaries and be accepted on to the medical register this way.

Realising that she could not progress in the UK, Eliza Walker applied to study medicine at the University of Zurich.

In the summer of 1867 the Russian, Nadezhda Suslova, who had been attending lectures and studying medicine in Russia and Switzerland for several years, passed her qualifying examinations for the M.D.

[7] Eliza Walker studied at Zurich 1868-72, along with two other British women, Frances Elizabeth Morgan and Louisa Atkins.

[7][8] After studying there for four years, she submitted her thesis on blockages of the arteries of the brain (Ueber Verstopfung der Hirnarterien), receiving an MD with distinction in 1872.

[2] On her return to England in 1873, Dr Walker applied for and was appointed to the position of House Surgeon at Bristol Hospital for Sick Children (est.

[13] However, five weeks later, an argument between Walker and another staff member over the treatment of a patient led to the remainder of the doctors, all male, walking out.

[14] After the walk-out, Walker remained in post for five more days, the only medical practitioner on site, before tendering her resignation on 25 July to save the hospital further embarrassment.

The King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland were the first UK authority to allow women who already had foreign degrees to take their licence examinations there from 1877.

[22][23][24] Dr Walker Dunbar's name was added to the UK medical register on 12 September 1877, along with Louisa Atkins, Frances Hogan and Sophia Jex-Blake, who also took their exams in Dublin that year.

[29] However, at the same meeting the BMA decided to expel women who had been recently been accepted as members, such as Frances Hogan, on the grounds that they had been 'illegally elected' and 'inadvertently admitted to the Association'.

[32] There they lobbied successfully for the BMA to remove its bar on the admission of women.In 1895, Dr Dunbar established the Bristol Private Hospital for Women and Children at 34 Berkeley Square,[33] Clifton, where she held the post of Senior Surgeon until her death.

[1] In accordance with her written instructions, her remains were cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in London on 30 August, her ashes afterwards being scattered in the Garden of Rest.

On her death a colleague commented:Dr Dunbar was essentially a pioneer, and to the end of her career she showed as outstanding qualities courage, perseverance and pluck.

[45] Although Dunbar was a Temperance supporter, she was critical of both teetotalism and the common tendency to blame the poor for their drinking habits, which was often cast as an inherited deficiency.

She was remarkably loyal and devoted to her old friends and patients, by whom also she was greatly beloved, and her sympathy and support were always forthcoming for the women's cause, to the advancement of which she herself so ably and fearlessly contributed.

[46]A local medical journal added:It is well to recall that the present advantage of freedom to work enjoyed by women are the direct fruit of the heroic struggles of those earlier determined spirits who, like Dr. Walker Dunbar, fought their way onward through obloquy and opposition.