Sophia Jex-Blakethe BridgeENTJ

At 30, on the afternoon of Friday 18 November 1870, Sophia Jex-Blake walked with six other women to Surgeons' Hall in Edinburgh to sit an anatomy examination.

A crowd was waiting: students and several hundred onlookers filling the road. The gates stood open until the women came close. Then a group of young men slammed them shut in their faces. Mud and rubbish flew, and so did insults.

Somebody opened the gate again, a janitor by some accounts, a friendly student by others. The women went in by the front and sat the exam. Partway through, the college's pet sheep was let in through a back door to break it up.

Afterward, by one account, they were offered a quieter way out at the back. They refused. A band of supportive men students, nicknamed the Irish Brigade, walked them out past the crowd, well spattered with mud.

Front door in, front door out. That was her strategy, and it was her character. Bridges in a fight often feel completely alone. That afternoon she had six women beside her and a band of young men at her back.

She was born in Hastings on 21 January 1840, rich, brilliant and forceful. Medicine in Britain was all but closed to women. On 2 November 1869 she and four other women she had recruited signed the matriculation roll at the University of Edinburgh. More joined them, and history calls them the Edinburgh Seven. Resistance met them everywhere.

She believed the riot had been stirred up on purpose, and she looked past the mob to the system behind it. She named Mr Craig, class assistant to one of her fiercest opponents, as a ringleader. He sued her for libel and won, but the court awarded him one farthing, the smallest coin in the realm.

Public sympathy did not win the war. In 1873, when she was 33, the courts ruled that the women should never have been admitted. The road through Edinburgh was closed. She had done most of the work and taken most of the blows, and she was blunt enough to lose allies along the way.

Then came the move that worked. She kept the destination and changed the road. In 1874 she helped found the London School of Medicine for Women. In January 1877 she took her doctorate in medicine at Bern, and a few months later a license from the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Dublin. That put her on the British Medical Register, the third woman to get there.

Then she went back to the city that had shut her out. In 1878 she put up her brass plate in Edinburgh, the city's first woman doctor, and soon opened a clinic where poor women could be treated for a few pence. In 1886 she founded a medical school for women there.

In 1892 the Scottish universities finally opened to women students. She was 52, and alive to see it. She died on 7 January 1912, at 71.

The gate at Surgeons' Hall was slammed in her face. She went round it, through London, Bern and Dublin, and came home to build her own door.