She used her half day holiday each week to study, attending the Edinburgh Central School of Pharmacy, Clyde Street, run by Mr W.B.Cowie.
[4][5] While there she presented her first research paper ‘Note on an Arsenic, Iron and Quinine Mixture’ to the PSGB's North British Branch in Edinburgh on 17 February 1904.
"[4] Having subsequently spent three years working for Mr J Beetham Wilson in Dorking, she had saved enough to fulfil her ambition to take the higher PSGB Major exam.
[5] On her father's death in 1913, the need to contribute financially to support her family meant that she moved back to retail pharmacy, as her research role was poorly paid.
[5] She spent a year in Slough working for Mr Charles Sangster “to whom Miss Borrowman expresses special indebtedness for training in modern business knowledge and methods”.
Based on her earlier experiences, virtually everything was made on the premises, and her staff wore her own design of distinctive shop dress with sage green cuffs and collar, in an attempt to overcome prejudice against women pharmacists by presenting a professional appearance.
[5] In January 1945, a V2 bomb fell close to the pharmacy in Clapham, and badly damaged the building, probably with Borrowman inside in the air raid shelter that she had had constructed in the old cellars.
[4] She held numerous committee roles: for the South West Chemists’ Association including as President (1929–31);[4] for the South West PSGB Branch;[4] as vice-president of her local branch of the Retail Pharmacists’ Union;[4] and as a member of the Pharmacy sub-committee of the British Pharmaceutical Codex Revision Committee (1934–37), the first woman to be appointed to this body.
[5] Borrowman was clearly a formidable and determined character, described in 1954 as having a "robust independence of outlook, accepting nothing that wilts under the probing beam of logic.
"[3] In her obituary, it was stated that “Even in her last few weeks she remained a fighter, and during spells of consciousness would talk of people and things connected with her earlier days in the business for which she had lived and fought for forty years.”[5] An anonymous tribute to her concluded “she appeared to have an almost indestructible vitality.