[1] When UCH was evacuated to Cardiff in 1941, Stokes decided to make a career change from clinical medicine to pathology.
She began training as a pathologist at the London Public Health Laboratory in Watford, where she worked with Arnold Ashley Miles.
[2] Stokes is credited as a pioneer in turning bacteriology into a clinical subspecialty of medicine, rather than a strictly scientific branch of pathology.
She served as president of the Royal Society of Medicine's pathology division in 1967–68, and in 1971 she became a fellow of University College London.
[2] In 1940 in Chelsea, London, she married the physician John Fisher Stokes, who was elected FRCP in 1947.