The Royal India Mail was waiting at Victoria Railway Station in Bombay, its destination, Calcutta. There was no turning back now for Mac. Her passage from England on the ss NARKUNDA was over, her short stay in Bombay at an end, and it was now time to get serious about her three year research PhD. Within hours, Dr Elizabeth Stuart-MacKenzie would be entering the portals of the Calcutta School of Tropical medicine to be interviewed by the august Board of Governors, who all believed that a woman’s place was in the home.

Would she be accepted? She had no idea, but she had an unshakeable belief in her ability to change the world of obstetrics in this sub-continent, and a dogged determination to follow in the footsteps of Sir Ronald Ross, Nobel Prize winner, and discoverer of the link between malaria and mosquitoes. Whatever the hurdles ahead, Mac was a woman of substance and treated misogyny with contempt . . .