Elizabeth Garrett was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England, the middle child of Newson and Louisa Garrett.
Elizabeth Garrett was born on 9 June 1836 in the small coastal town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England. She was the second daughter and middle child among the ten children of Newson Garrett, a self-made businessman who would later run a malting and shipping business, and his wife Louisa.
Although her family moved briefly to Whitechapel in London before returning to settle permanently in Suffolk in 1841, Aldeburgh became the town most associated with her name and legacy. Growing up in a large, prosperous, and intellectually engaged household, Elizabeth and her siblings—including her younger sister Millicent Fawcett, who would become a leading suffragist—were encouraged by their father to pursue education and independent thought, unusual for the era's expectations of women.
This upbringing, combined with exposure to reform-minded family friends and the broader currents of Victorian social change, laid the groundwork for Elizabeth's extraordinary career. She would go on to challenge the near-total exclusion of women from the medical profession in Britain, eventually becoming the country's first qualified female physician and surgeon, a pioneering hospital founder, medical educator, and Britain's first female mayor.