The woman generally considered to have laid claim to this title is Emily Howard Stowe. Inspired by her husband's illness from tuberculosis, Stowe studied medicine at the New York Medical College for Women. The lifelong champion of women's rights and former Brantford, Ontario teacher was forced to study in the United States because no Canadian college would accept a female student.

Stowe, who's also credited with being the first woman principal in Canada, graduated in 1867 and set up a doctor's office in Toronto, becoming the first woman to practise medicine in Canada. She attracted many woman patients, but a law in Ontario was passed that said all doctors trained in the U.S. had to attend lectures a medical school here.

Stowe, therefore, was practising without a licence, which was allowed at the time. But Stowe wasn't the first to get her licence when that technicality was introduced. Dr. Lawrence Segal of Toronto, who has researched this topic, says the controversy around this question is that Jennie Kidd Trout was the first licenced woman physician. She earned that title in 1875, while Stowe didn't get her licence until 1880. And there was also another woman who was licenced to practise midwifery, and she might have been considered a doctor at the time as well, he added.

"Of course, if you're going to say who was the first doctor it was probably some native North American," says Segal. "But if you qualify it as who was the first Canadian woman licenced as a doctor then it's Trout."

Not that Stowe doesn't have her own claims to fame. In her book The Indomitable Lady Doctors, author Carlotta Hacker says Stowe's struggle to enter the profession led her to help organize the Women's Medical College in Toronto in 1883. She also founded the Toronto Women's Literary Club, Canada's first suffrage group, and was principal founder and first president of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association in 1889.