Elizabeth Leech (d. 1886) was an English pharmacist known for her struggle to be admitted to the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.
Her father, Thomas Leech, ran a chemist's shop in Rochdale, Lancashire.
[2] With the economic downturn of the Lancashire cotton famine in the early 1860s, she had to close her shop, and became compounder and dispenser of prescriptions at the Munster House Lunatic Asylum in Fulham.
In 1869, Leech became the first woman to apply for membership of the Pharmaceutical Society, partly in support of her efforts to reopen a shop.
[5] The first women (Rose Coombes Minshull and Isabella Skinner Clarke) were admitted to the Pharmaceutical Society in 1879,[6] and Leech was finally elected a member in 1880.