JESSIE BOYD SCRIVER

By Susan Button on behalf of the Centenary Committee

Jessie Boyd Scrivens
Jessie Boyd Scriver

Which current member of the UWCM has had the privilege of meeting not one but two of the Club’s founding members? I am the fortunate one! I had the honour of speaking with Dr. Boyd Scriver in 1984 at the book launching of A Fair Shake: Autobiographical Essays by McGill Women, written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the admission of women to McGill. I have taken the liberty of using this photo from the book, as I was very forward at the time and asked Dr. Boyd Scriver for her autograph.

As mentioned in my September 2025 newsletter article on founding member Elizabeth Monk, I was also privileged to meet Miss Monk in 1978 when I was working in the History of McGill Project and she visited to talk with its author
Dr. Stanley Frost.

Born in Montreal in 1894, Jessie Boyd trained as a musician and teacher at McGill University before deciding that medicine was her calling. Opportunities were opening up due to the need for physicians because of the demands of World War One and she was in the first class which started in 1918 and graduated in 1922. Miss Boyd was second overall in the class of 126 and won the Wood Gold Medal for excellence in clinical medicine.

After graduation, Dr. Boyd did postgraduate work in sickle-cell anemia at the Royal Victoria Hospital. She also trained in pediatrics at Harvard University and the Children’s Hospital in Boston from 1924 to 1926.

Jessie Boyd married Dr. Walter Scriver, an internist and also a McGill University medical school graduate, in 1924. Their son Charles was born six years later. He would also graduate from McGill as a medical doctor and is often called “the father of modern genetics in Quebec” for his pioneering work on genetic disorders in children.

Being one of the first women to study medicine, Jessie Boyd Scriver was often asked how the females were accepted by their fellow male students. In her autobiographical essay she reports that “the students on the whole were tolerant …However, a small number resented the intrusion and one evening … when two of us were studying in my home, a small delegation called on us to warn us that the Anatomy dissecting course … would be very distasteful to young ladies of our upbringing, and they advised us to withdraw!” The ladies simply refused. When asked about reasons for a lack of hostility or unpleasantness towards them (except for the memory of another classmate, Dr. Mary Childs, that there was one occasion when “bloody spleens were thrown at them during anatomy class”), Dr. Boyd Scriver replied that the explanation was that “we walked very warily … there was nothing militant or aggressive about us.”

Dr. Boyd Scriver continued her practice for forty-one years. She became an associate professor of medicine at McGill University, was pediatrician-in-chief at the Royal Victoria Hospital and a physician at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.

In 1979, McGill University awarded Dr. Boyd Scriver an honorary Doctor of Science. In 1982, she was the recipient of the Canadian Pediatric Society’s Ross Award, which is awarded annually for distinguished service to children.
Dr. Jessie Boyd Scriver passed away in 2000 at the age of 105 – she had certainly earned the title pediatrician extraordinaire.

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