Matilda Johanna Clerk (2 March 1916 – 27 December 1984) was a medical pioneer and a science educator on the Gold Coast and later in Ghana as well as the second Ghanaian woman to become an orthodox medicine-trained physician.

[3][12] By breaking the glass ceiling in medicine and other institutional barriers to healthcare delivery, they were an inspiration to a generation of post-colonial Ghanaian and West African female doctors at a time the field was still a male monopoly and when the vast majority of women worldwide had very limited access to biomedicine and higher education.

[23] Her grandaunt was Regina Hesse (1832─1898), a pioneer educator and school principal who worked with the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast.

Clerk to enroll in the course in 1940, her father had to formally petition the then Governor of the Gold Coast, Arnold Wienholt Hodson for a special waiver.

[3] Based on her superior academic performance, she was awarded a rare medical scholarship by the colonial government to study medicine (MBChB) at the University of Edinburgh from 1944 to 1949.

[1][3] By winning the award, she became the first Ghanaian woman in the annals of history and in any field to secure a scholarship for higher education abroad.

Clerk was also the first woman in Ghana and West Africa to pursue postgraduate qualifications at a graduate school when she obtained a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene (DTM&H) in 1950 from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a constituent college of the University of London; she returned to her homeland in January 1951.

[1][2][3][33][34] In 1933, Sierra Leonean political activist Edna Elliot-Horton became the second West African woman higher education graduate and the first to complete a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts.

[35] Many leading lights in the Gold Coast medical profession during that period, including her fellow pioneering colleagues, Charles Odamtten Easmon, Emmanuel Evans-Anfom and Susan Ofori-Atta, also attended Achimota School and the University of Edinburgh Medical School.

[3] The Ghanaian physician, scholar, university administrator and public servant Emmanuel Evans-Anfom delivered a eulogy at her funeral.

[3][13] In 2024, a memorial mural of Matilda Clerk was unveiled at Nuffield House, Guy's Hospital in London, in recognition of her pioneering contributions to medicine and healthcare.