Ruth Bensusan-Butt
{{short description|English general practitioner (1877–1957)}}
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| birth_date = {{birth year|1877}}
| birth_place = Anerley, UK
| death_date = {{death year and age|1957|1877}}
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| occupation = Physician
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| children = 3, including David and John
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Ruth Bensusan-Butt (née Bensusan; 1877 – 1957) was an English physician who was the first woman physician in Colchester.
Biography
Born 1877, in Anerley, to a Jewish family, she was the sister-in-law of the painter Lucien Pissarro, who had married Esther Bensusan, Ruth's older sister.{{cite web |url=https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/bookcase-and-flowers-142542 |title=Bookcase and Flowers |publisher=Art UK |accessdate=15 November 2013}}
When the family moved to Upper Norwood she went to Sydenham High School. She trained at the University of Zurich, the Royal Free Hospital and in Dublin and qualified in 1904. She spent several years in Italy and was married in Naples in 1910.
When an earthquake struck Italy in 1907, Bensusan organised food, medical supplies and clothes for the refugees from Rome, She later sailed, along with doctors Caroline Matthews and Worthington, to the scene of the quake in Calabria.{{Cite news|date=16 January 1909|title=Heroism in Italy: how English women doctors have worked in the earthquake zone|page=12|work=The Daily Mirror}}
In 1909, she went to the Fabian Society summer school in North Wales and became an active suffragist, sometimes marching in her medical gown. She sold copies of the Webbs' Minority report on the Poor Law.
She and her husband, Geoffrey Crawford Butt, bought The Minories, Colchester, in 1915. She used the front rooms as her consulting rooms, and also opened Colchester's first infant nursery there.{{Cite web |last=Lindsey |year=1987 |url=http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=21990#n41 |title=Dr. Ruth Bensusan-Butt 1877–1957 |publisher=Essex University. History B.A. project |accessdate=15 November 2013}} She sold the building and the garden to the Victor Batte-Lay Trust in 1956.
She became an active member of the Socialist Medical Association{{cite news|title=Socialist Doctor|url=https://www.sochealth.co.uk/the-socialist-health-association/socialism-and-health/the-socialist-doctor/the-socialist-doctor-vol-2-no1/|accessdate=15 May 2017|publisher=Socialist Medical Association|date=August 1933}} and organised a debate on "A State Medical Service" at the Colchester branch of the British Medical Association in January 1932.{{cite news|title=Socialist Doctor|issue=2|date=4 March 1932}}
She had three children, John, a landscape artist, Barbara, and David, an economist. Barbara and David were twins.Keith Tribe, Economic careers: economics and economists in Britain, 1930-1970 (1997), p. 61 She died on 1957, aged 79 or 80.
A blue plaque in her memory was placed at The Minories in 2017.{{cite book|title=Early Fabian, Woman's Suffragist, Much Loved Colchester GP|date=March 2017|publisher=Colchester Fabian Society|location=Colchester}}