Beatrice Garvie, 1872-1959
Beatrice Garvie was a very early woman doctor. She was also a remarkable photographer.
She qualified with the 'Triple Qualification', all that was available before universities agreed that women could be awarded degrees too. Throughout her career, she championed the right to public health for all.
She worked in Glasgow, India, Rotherham and London, before she came to Orkney, where she spent 16 years as the doctor on North Ronaldsay.
"She always wore britches and she smoked like a chimney" was one islander's recollection of the doctor he had known through his childhood.
She was also well known as a photographer of island life, perhaps most especially the lives of women and children on the island. She would give copies of her photographs to the islanders who were in them. She also kept her own copies in albums that she had with her until she died.
Over the last few years I've worked to document her photographs, and her life, with islanders who remember her. I've taken those stories back to North Ronaldsay, to rekindle memories of her, and her remarkable archive of photographs.
This blog records some of that work, in ten posts, alongside a few of her photographs, which are now a captioned resource in the Orkney Library and Archive.
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