Sophia Seekings Friel

Sophia Seekings Friel (3 December 1873 – 17 July 1954)[1] was an English doctor, and maternity & child welfare campaigner,[1] who with Jessy Kent-Parsons pioneered a mother and baby treatment centre in Tottenham, London in 1912, and was one of the first Maternity and Child Welfare Inspectors.

[6] In the same year, Seekings put forward the idea of a 'school for mothers', and in 1912 she and Jessy Kent-Parsons (1882?- 1966)[2] 'rented a house in an area with the highest infant mortality rate and opened the school'.

[1] From this point, while still an Assistant Minister of Health (MOH), the two operated the Tottenham ‘school for mothers’, working to tackle the high rates of infant mortality reported throughout London during the first decade of the 20th century.

[2] Seekings was one of the first Maternity and Child Welfare Inspectors, Honorary Secretary of the National Baby Welfare Council, member of the Royal Sanitary Institute, the Federation of Medical Women, and the Health and Cleanliness Council, Vice President of the Women Sanitary Inspectors' & Health Visitors' Association (WSIHVA) 1918–9, and its trustee for over three decades.

[10] In Louisa Martindale's The Woman Doctor (1922), she as listed as working as a clinical assistant in the throat, nose, and ear department of the Royal Free Hospital.