Why not name the new Southmead Hospital after Bristol medical pioneer Elizabeth Blackwell?
Elizabeth Blackwell, after whom the new hospital at Southmead could yet be named, was the country's very first properly qualified female doctor.
Born into a Quaker family in 1821, she was the third of nine children who were educated in the city before their father Samuel, a sugar refiner, decided to emigrate to the United States. Elizabeth was then just 11 years old.
Although, in those days, the very idea of a woman becoming a doctor was inconceivable, a very determined Elizabeth took up teaching to raise funds to go to medical school in New York.
And after the faculty had, very democratically, put it to a student vote the young woman was accepted.
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In 1849 she became the very first woman to be awarded a medical degree in the United States.
But to have a paper qualification was apparently not enough to sway the minds of a male dominated profession.
Banned from most hospitals, she and her sister Emily founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
During the American Civil War (1861-5) Elizabeth trained many women as nurses.
In 1869, she returned to England and, along with Crimean nursing legend, Florence Nightingale, opened the Women's Medical College
Due to her tenacity, Elizabeth became the first female physician and doctor to be placed on the GMC register.
She retired a year later but carried on with her interests in the Women's Rights Movement.
If the new hospital at Southmead is going to have anyone's name attached to it then surely it should be Elizabeth Blackwell, rather than, say, the Portsmouth-born engineer, Brunel.
This remarkable woman, who pushed open the door for female medics yet to come, died in 1910 and is buried in Scotland.
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