Lucy Everest Boole, the first female professor at the London School of Medicine for Women and the first female member of the Royal Institute of Chemistry

August 5, 1862, Cork (Ireland) - December 5, 1904, London (United Kingdom)

Lucy Boole, Irish chemist and pharmacist, was the first female professor at the London School of Medicine for Women at the Royal Free Hospital and the first female member of the Royal Institute of Chemistry.

His father was a mathematician and logician and his mother was a self-taught mathematician and educator interested in Pedagogy. Lucy was the fourth of five sisters, some of them also outstanding. Her sister Alicia was a mathematician and Ethel Lilian Voynich was a novelist. When her father died in 1864, she left the family in a bad economic situation, so they had to return to England and her mother began to work as a librarian at Queen's College in London.

Lucy studied at a school attached to Queens College but did not receive a university education. Between 1883 and 1888, she attended the school of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society where she studied Chemistry as part of her training as a pharmacist and devoted herself to research.

In 1893, he began teaching at the London School of Medicine. She was the first woman elected to membership in the Institute of Chemistry (later to become the Royal Institute of Chemistry) and the first female professor at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

In addition, he co-published with Sir Wyndham Dunstan, Director of the Imperial Institute in London, including the article: "An Inquiry into the Vessicating Constituent of Croton Oil" and developed the procedure for analyzing tartar emetic that was proposed in a joint article with Dunstan in 1889 becoming the official method of analysis until 1963.

Little is known of his private life, she never married and lived with his mother in Notting Hill in London until she fell ill in 1897 and died in 1904 at the age of 42.