Agnes Marshall Cowan

[2] She was the sixth of eleven children and the family lived in a large stone villa in the Grange district in the south of the city.

[3] Cowan was one of the first female students admitted to the University of Edinburgh and studied medicine alongside Jessie Gellatly, Mabel L. Ramsay and others.

In the summer of 1911 she was motivated to leave Scotland and travelled to China as a medical missionary to address the outbreak of pneumonia in the north, known in the UK as the Manchurian plague.

Her duties here included treating victims of explosions and attending the side effects of breathing and touching the caustic substances.

[2] However, from September 1931, things had started to go wrong, due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which included the capture of Harbin in February 1932.

However, as the Japanese control spread and with the imminent onset of the Second World War Cowan left Manchuria in the summer 1939, never to return.