VAKIL, Merbai Ardesir,‡ born Bombay (Mumbai), 25 May 1868, died Bombay 9 April 1941. Physician. Daughter of Ardesir Framji Vakil, Parsi solicitor.

Merbai Ardesir Vakil attended Wilson High School and Wilson College, Bombay, becoming the first woman to graduate from there, in 1888. After studying at Grant Medical College, Bombay, she left to attend first the London School of Medicine for Women, and then, from 1893, Queen Margaret College, Glasgow. She graduated with the degree of MBCM on 22 July 1897, the first Asian woman to graduate from a Scottish university. After postgraduate work in Glasgow, she worked in the Cama Hospital for Women and Children in Bombay and in other hospitals and dispensaries. In March 1927 she left for Aden, first in the employment of the British government, and then in private practice. She returned to Bombay in poor health in March 1941.

She was not, however, the first woman from India to achieve medical qualifications in Scotland. In 1888, Annie Wardlaw Jagannadham (1864—94), born to Indian parents in Chicacole (Srikakulam), Andhra Pradesh, and Annie Catharine Wells (b. 1868), also born in India, having spent some years studying medicine at Madras University, joined Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women, run by *Sophia Jex-Blake. Among fellow students were *Margaret Balfour, *Margaret Todd and *Elsie Inglis. In 1890 both women secured the ‘triple qualification’ from RCPE, RCSE and the Glasgow Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons. Annie Jagannadham, described by Sophia Jex-Blake as of ‘fine and finished character’ (Todd, p. 504) was appointed house-physician at Leith Hospital. Returning to India in 1892, she became the housesurgeon at Cama Hospital, where she died two years later of tuberculosis. JR

• Glasgow University Archives, Matriculation Records R8/5/14—17/10, Medical Examiners Schedule, MED 5/2/5, correspondence, DC233/2/10/6/1; RCSEd, Medical Schedules for the Triple Qualification, 904 and 955. Balfour, M. I. and Young, R. (1929) Medical Women in India; (1890) Second Report of the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, 1888—1890; ‘The Late Dr Annie Wardlaw Jagannadham’, Chronicle of the London Missionary Society (1894) 34, pp. 232-33 (obit.); Ramanna, M. (2002) Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845—1895; Somerville, J. M. (2005), ‘Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women’, Proc. Roy. Coll. Phys. Edin. 35, pp. 261—7; Todd, M. (1918) Life of Sophia Jex-Blake.