Stone, Constance (1856–1902)

Australian doctor and feminist who paved the way for women doctors in Melbourne and co-founded the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital for women. Name variations: Emma Constance Stone. Born Emma Constance Stone on December 4, 1856, in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; died of tuberculosis on December 29, 1902; daughter of William Stone and Betsey (Haydon) Stone; educated at home before attending Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania; University of Trinity College in Toronto, Canada, M.D.; studied at the Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in London; married David Egryn Jones (a minister); children: daughter Bronwen.

Constance Stone was born in 1856 in Tasmania, Australia, to English parents. Like many women of the time, Stone began her professional career as a teacher, in St. Kilda, Melbourne, but hoped to enter the field of medicine. Since the University of Melbourne barred women from medical studies, she had to leave her native Australia to study abroad. In 1884, she traveled to the United States to study medicine at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and completed her M.D. at the University of Trinity College in Toronto, Canada. Stone rounded out her medical studies at the Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in London, where she also gained practical experience at the New Hospital for Women and Children. The hospital, administered entirely by women, was a precursor to the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital which Stone would later establish in Australia.

Stone's intensive studies and extensive experience were rewarded when she became the first woman to be registered with the Medical Board of Victoria in 1890. Constance Stone pulled the fledgling medical community of Australian women together with the founding of the Victorian Medical Women's Society in 1895, and was active in suffrage work and social reform organizations. Working with her sister Grace Clara Stone and cousin Emily Mary Page Stone , who were also doctors, she conducted a clinic for women and children.

The genesis for the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital was an outpatient dispensary which Stone ran three mornings a week in 1896, out of the church pastored by her husband. Most of the women doctors in Melbourne fell in line with Stone's vision for a hospital staffed entirely by women for the benefit of the poor of their gender. It operated out of temporary quarters until the facility could be built. Unfortunately, Stone became ill with tuberculosis shortly before the permanent hospital opened in 1899; she died on December 29, 1902.

sources:

Radi, Heather, ed. 200 Australian Women. NSW, Australia: Women's Redress Press, 1988.

Uglow, Jennifer S., comp. and ed. The International Dictionary of Women's Biography. NY: Continuum, 1982.

Barbara Koch , freelance writer, Farmington Hills, Michigan