Passion and Profession, Doctors in Skirts: The Letters of Doctors Frieda Fraser and Edith Bickerton Williams

"Passion and Profession; Doctors in Skirts," is based on the extensive correspondence between Dr. Frieda Fraser and Dr. Edith Bickerton Williams, two Canadian women who were lovers from 1924 and life partners from 1937, until the death of Dr. Williams in 1979. Dr. Fraser became a prominent researcher and lecturer of Microbiology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Williams was one of the first women in North America to graduate as a Veterinarian. Dr. Frieda Fraser's medical training afforded her the freedom to foster a same-sex relationship with her partner Edith. Her freedom was constrained however, as women interns were placed in institutions thought appropriate for their sex, and prospects of private practice for a woman doctor were bleak. The letters' candid accounts of conflicts with male authority, challenges to ideas about sexuality, and the pervasiveness of prejudice, often reinforced by the scientific community, are important to the History of Medicine. The paper demonstrated that the same-sex relationship and identity, developed in the course of the Fraser/Williams correspondence, proved a primary source of strength in the face of the doctors' tribulations and triumphs as professionals in the medical field.