Susila Bonnerjee

She was one of six children (four sisters and two brothers), and was educated and lived primarily in Croydon, England, where her parents owned a home.

[1] Bonnerjee was educated at the Croyden High School for Girls, and later attended Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied the natural sciences.

She later moved back to her familial home in Kolkata, India, and in Delhi, at Cambridge Mission Hospital.

[1] Her sister Janaki has recorded in her memoirs that Bonnerjee was the only available doctor at her mission station during a plague epidemic, and that the strain of treating patients in this time affected her own health.

[2] She continued to travel between India and England to teach medicine and raise funds for women's education until her death in 1920.

Seated third from left is Dr Susila Bonnerjee at a meeting of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage meeting in Brighton, 1913. Newnham College archives, Cambridge.