Historical diploma presented to medical school
Anne Portress, the mayor of Ravenshoe in Australia, travelled halfway around the world to see where her grandmother practised medicine, and present the Faculty of Medicine with the graduation diploma of Newfoundland's first woman doctor. That woman was Edith Weeks Hooper, a native of Bay Bulls and the first Newfoundland woman to graduate from medical school.
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| The framed medical diploma of Edith Weeks, the first Newfoundland woman to practise medicine in the province, was presented this fall to the Faculty of Medicine by Dr. Weeks Hooper's granddaughter, Anne Portress. Accepting on behalf of the medical school were (L-R) Dr. Roy West, acting dean, Dr. John Crellin, history of medicine, and Dr. Ian Rusted, dean emeritus. Historian Paul O'Neill (R) started doing research on Dr. Weeks Hooper in the 1970s and is responsible for obtaining the framed picture hanging in the HSC and for arranging the framing of the diploma, and its presentation. |
In 1902-03, Edith Weeks did pre-med at Dalhousie University, and from there she went to the University of Toronto where she graduated from Trinity College in 1906 with the degrees of doctor of medicine and master of surgery. In 1906 she registered with the Newfoundland Medical Board and joined the staff of the General Hospital in St. John's, where she worked for the next four years.
While in St. John's, Ms. Portress visited the Health Sciences Centre to see the portrait of her grandmother hanging in a corridor on the second floor, and to present the Faculty of Medicine with her grandmother's 1906 medical diploma. The diploma is now on display in the History of Medicine reading room.
Edith Weeks left Newfoundland in 1910 with her father, who had decided to retire to British Columbia. In 1912 she married Henry Hooper, an Australian working in Canada, and in 1914 they moved to Australia.
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