Alice Vickery

Alice Vickery (also known as A. Vickery Drysdale and A. Drysdale Vickery, c. 1844 – 12 January 1929) was an English physician, campaigner for women's rights, and the first British woman to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist. She and her life partner, Charles Robert Drysdale, also a physician, actively supported a number of causes, including free love, birth control, and destigmatisation of illegitimacy.

Vickery was born in Swimbridge, Devon, in 1844, as the fifth child and second daughter of John Vickery, a piano maker and organ builder, and his wife Frances Mary Vickery née Leah. By 1851, the family had moved to Peckham, South London, but Vickery remained in Devon at school. She joined her family in London in 1861 and founded employment as a pupil teacher.

Vickery began her medical career at the Ladies' Medical College in 1869. There she met the lecturer Charles Robert Drysdale and started a relationship with him. They never married, as they both agreed that marriage was "legal prostitution" and opposed the institution. Society, however, generally presumed that the pair were married, as had their contemporaries known that they were in a free union, their careers likely would have suffered. Vickery sometimes added Drysdale's name to her own, referring to herself both as "Dr. Vickery Drysdale" and as "Dr. Drysdale Vickery".

In 1873, Vickery obtained a midwife's degree from the Obstetrical Society. On 18 June the same year, she passed the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Minor exam, becoming the first qualified female chemist and druggist. Afterward, Vickery went to study medicine at the University of Paris, as women were not allowed to attend any British medical school. There she gave birth to her first child, Charles Vickery Drysdale.

Vickery became fluent in French, later publishing translations of important French works through organisations such as the National British Women’s Temperance Association’s magazine Woman’s Signal. Her translation of "On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship" by the philosopher and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet was published in 1912.

The UK Medical Act 1876 allowed women to obtain medical degrees. Vickery returned to England in 1877, after the King and Queen's College of Physicians, Ireland, refused to recognise her previous qualifications. In 1880, she became one of five women who qualified as physicians in the kingdom, obtaining her degree from the London School of Medicine for Women, and started practising medicine. In August 1881 her second son, George Vickery Drysdale was born.^{[unreliable source?]}

Vickery became an early member of the Malthusian League and an outspoken supporter of birth control after the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were arrested for publishing a book about contraception in 1877. When she was called to testify at the trial, she spoke about the dangers of too frequent childbirths and of using over-lactation as a contraception method.

Vickery had to temporarily withdraw from the League, however, because the London Medical School for Women did not approve of her activities. She resumed membership in 1880, when she obtained her degree, and spent the following decades lecturing about birth control as a key element to the emancipation of women. At the same time, she actively opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts.