Louisa Atkins

[3] When still young, she went to India, where in 1860 she married Frederick William Maclean Atkins[5] - an army officer many years her senior.

[3] As women were not yet permitted to sit the examinations of any of the medical licensing bodies, Atkins was not fully registered, but the hospital's committee awarded her the position over two male candidates.

[10] In 1877, Atkins took the Licence of the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland when they began to admit women, qualifying alongside Sophia Jex-Blake and Edith Pechey.

[12] Atkins resigned from the New Hospital for Women in 1888, due to her unheeded concerns about Garrett Anderson's surgical proficiency.

[3] This work, wrote The BMJ, "engaged her powers and absorbed her interest, to the great advantage of her patients' health (she was most successful in her practice) and to the acquisition of more than her share of devoted friends (she was much beloved)".

[3] Mary Scharlieb described Atkins as "an excellent physician and was able to bring to her patients' service those powers of vision and sympathy without which the greatest professional skill and knowledge are comparatively useless.

[3] The BMJ reported that it had been "her wish that her death should not appear in tho obituary columns of the papers, and so it came about that the event escaped the notice even of those among those circle of her intimate friends".

In an obituary for the Medical Women's Federation, Mary Scharlieb wrote of Atkins:She was a woman who never courted publicity and was fully satisfied by her own consciousness that she had done her best and that her best was adequate.