Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher, and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a university education, when six other women and she, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women, she was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no other medical schools were training women.

Helen de Lacey Evans was the fifth member of the Edinburgh Seven, a group of women who enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1869, and who sought to qualify as physicians. She married the editor of The Scotsman, Alexander Russel and was mother to the suffragist and feminist campaigner Helen Archdale.