Edith Mary Brown

Brown was born in Whitehaven, Cumberland, the daughter of George Wightman Brown, a bank manager, and Mary Walther Brown. She was educated at Manchester High School for Girls and Croydon High School, then went to Girton College, Cambridge, on a natural sciences scholarship, taking second-class honours in 1885. She trained at the London School of Medicine for Women and qualified in 1891 with the Scottish Triple Qualification, becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

Sent out by the Baptist Missionary Society, Brown arrived in Bombay on 9 November 1891. Struck by the state of maternal healthcare and by the fact that many Indian women would not be examined by male doctors, she resolved to train Indian women as doctors and midwives.

She opened the North India School of Medicine for Christian Women at Ludhiana in January 1894 with four students and four staff. It was supported by grants and by women's auxiliary committees in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Admission was opened to non-Christian students from 1909, and the institution was renamed Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, in 1911. It grew to include schools of medicine, nursing and pharmacy and a 200-bed hospital.

During the violence of Partition in 1947 the college and hospital served as an emergency medical centre. By November 1951 the institution had trained 411 doctors, 143 nurses, 168 pharmacy dispensers and more than a thousand midwives. Brown retired as principal in 1952 and died at Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on 6 December 1956, aged 92.

Brown was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1932 New Year Honours.[2][3]