Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. I cast away this week this week is one of Britain's most distinguished doctors.

Although she claims never to have encountered discrimination

in her long and brilliant career,

the fact remains that she does stand out

as a woman who has achieved in a man's world. She decided to make it her life's work to improve the lot of

women in pregnancy and childbirth. She worked during the war in the emergency medical service,

saw the advent of the National Health Service,

and in more recent times the development of well-woman clinics and the test tube baby.

So effective was that role that ten years ago she made medical history herself when she was made the first woman president of the British Medical Association.

She is Dame Josephine Barnes.

Dame Josephine, the 139th President of the BMA, I think you were.

Was it a complete surprise to be invited?

Yes, it was. I was enormously honoured. Of course you do get a bit of warning because you get asked first it goes through various committees

Then you do a year as president-elect before you do your year as president. I was absolutely delighted. I thought it was the most wonderful

thing. It is quite a male bastion, isn't it? Well the first woman member of the

British Medical Association was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and they were so horrified when they

found what they'd done that they threw her out and closed the doors to women for

quite a long time. But you forced them open again or at least they opened

that. They opened them for me that. They opened them very nicely.

...