Laura Sandeman (1862-1929) was a pioneering General Practitioner in Aberdeen and political activist, taking a stand against the gender pay gap.
Laura Sandeman was born in Brashaw, Lincolnshire and studied medicine in Edinburgh, moving to Aberdeen in 1903, where she joined the practice of Elizabeth Latto Ewan, the city’s first female doctor (now Westburn Medical Group).
During the First World War, she was Chief Physician at the Girton and Newnham Unit (as the money had been raised by those Cambridge Colleges) of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service in France. Another young doctor who travelled with the unit, Isabel Emslie, also an Edinburgh graduate described Dr Sandeman thus:
“She was tall and ‘straight as a rash’ with a clean cut strong face and abundant iron-grey hair which was brushed back and braided. She was, I thought, hard and stern but the moment she laughed her whole face lit up and her dark brown eyes gave her more the look of a naughty schoolboy than of a sage woman doctor”
She refused to take up the post of Controller of Medical Services to Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps because her pay would be substantially less than she earned as a GP, and less than a man of the same rank. She eventually accepted the promotion in 1917, assuming responsibility for operations in France.
Returning to Scotland, Dr Sandeman gained a greater insight into the struggles of the poor at the Dundee workhouse. Desperate to help matters, she decided the best way to influence change was to enter politics and unsuccessfully ran for election in North Aberdeen in the 1924 General Election, and a 1928 by-election.
Dr Sandeman provided free General Practice services and mother and baby clinics to disadvantaged women and their families, long before the NHS was established.
She died during an influenza epidemic in 1929. More than 500 people lined the route as her coffin, wrapped in Stewart tartan, was carried from the station entrance to the railway carriage. A plaque has been put up at the Waverley Place building where Dr Sandeman lived, worked and died.
