User:Msinclair73/sandbox/Isabel Dunham (Gilbert) Greenwood

(Isabel Dunham (Gilbert) Greenwood) graduated from McGill Medical School with an M.D. in 1935, graduating as the only woman in her class. She was born in Buffalo, New York State in 1908 and home-schooled by her father, the Rev. John Mills Gilbert, until nine years of age. By that time, they had moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania where she attended the Friends Community School (Quaker), West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA from 1917-1922. She attended high school, and graduated in 1926 from Arlington Memorial High School, Vermont, USA. She entered Connecticut College for Women, in New London, Connecticut, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1930. While preparing for further studies she applied to medical schools at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Medical School, and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The University of Pennsylvania rejected her application; Harvard accepted her as a student but made clear that they could not award her a degree because she was a woman; and McGill University accepted her and promised her a degree upon graduating.

During her years at Connecticut College for Women, Isabel met Tom Greenwood, a British Church Army Captain working in the United States. While she pursued her degree, Tom returned to England to complete his GED in order to apply to university. When Isabel entered McGill, Tom entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He graduated in 1934, they married May 10, 1934, and he left to go to Canada's north while Isabel completed one more year at McGill, graduating in 1935 as a Doctor of Medicine. She was accepted by the Federal Government to work in the north as a medical doctor although her salary was provided from the funds allocated to the doctor already in residence in Aklavik. Isabel went north and became the local doctor in Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories.

In the 1930's there were few women doctors in the north and west of Canada, and a shortage of doctors in general. There is, to date, some thought that Dr. Isabel Greenwood was possibly the first woman doctor to practice North of 60. There is no evidence, to date from available research, to show that any of the other women doctors hired by the federal government went north, though there are a few biographies of women doctors in northern Alberta. Dr. Greenwood practiced for one year in Fort McPherson, and then she and Tom moved to England.

In England, during World War II, Isabel had an opportunity in 1940 to take over the medical practice of a doctor in Manchester, UK who was signing up with the military. She declined, by then being the mother of two young boys, and in the intervening five years since her graduation, new drugs, including penicillin, had been introduced into medical practice, making the practice a much different environment than she had trained for.

Isabel, from then on through her energies into volunteer work through local hospital auxiliaries, local school boards and the Anglican church. Subsequent moves brought the family back to Canada, first to Fort McMurray, Alberta, then Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, then Whitehorse, Yukon. After ten years in the Yukon, the family moved to Whitegate, Cheshire, UK .in 1962, then back to Kamloops, British Columbia in 1965. When Tom retired in 1969, they made a last move to Ottawa, Ontario, where they enjoyed proximity to their four children and Isabel's sister in the USA.

Isabel Greenwood died March 13, 2007 at the age of 98.

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