A newly-commissioned painting of female surgeons has been added to the portrait collection at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd).
‘Eleven Surgeons’ by Scottish artist Kirstin Mackinnon (below) features recipients of the Hunter Doig medal, awarded for excellence within the surgical profession. It includes consultant otolaryngologist Emma Stapleton, previous Newsround and Section Editor with ENT & Audiology News!
The painting is part of an exhibition 'A Fair Field and No Favour: The History and Future of Women in Surgery’, which shows collections from those fighting to change access to medical education – and the right to be a surgeon – over the past 500 years. As well as the exhibition, there will be a permanent museum display, a programme of oral history collecting to secure the histories of living female surgeons and an extensive programme of learning and engagement activities running throughout 2025–2026.
The phrase ‘a fair field and no favour’ comes from Sophia Jex-Blake, leader of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ who campaigned for equal access to medical education in the 1860s and met with huge opposition from the public and academic institutions. Her request was simple: equal opportunities with no exemptions.
The prestigious Hunter Doig award is named after pioneering female surgeons Alice Hunter (1880s-1973) and Caroline Doig (1938-2019), who also feature in the painting, along with the nine exceptional female surgeons – all of whom are still practicing.
Emma Stapleton is the only ENT specialist included in ‘Eleven Surgeons’ and only the second ENT to adorn the walls of the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh! The first was Arnold Maran, an Edinburgh-based ENT surgeon and Past President of RCSEd. (There has been one previous ENT surgeon President of RCSEd, Arthur Logan Turner, who doesn't have a portrait at RCSEd but does have a room named after him).
Previously only 3 out of the 144 portraits in the college collection featured women and so Surgeons’ Hall Museums, part of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, commissioned the painting as a step towards addressing the balance and as part of this wider initiative celebrating women’s contributions to surgery.
‘A Fair Field And No Favour’ opened on Saturday the 5th of April 2025 and will run until March 2026
museum.rcsed.ac.uk
