Margaret Elmes

Margaret Elmes (née Staley) was a supportive, generous doctor who combined her medical research with raising the profiles of women and associate specialists in the medical profession, and later the awareness of post-polio syndrome. Her parents had met and married while working in India. Margaret was born in Belfast during a visit “home” before returning to Jabalpur with her parents. She was sent “home” again at the age of 3, where she joined a school in Bexhill on Sea for children whose parents worked abroad and was subsequently looked after by her aunt and uncle. Sadly, her mother contracted benign quartan malaria, was treated with what was then the latest antimalarial drug—atebrine—but developed liver damage and died. The second world war and Britain’s economy afterwards also disrupted her father’s plans to return. Evacuated several times during the war, Margaret completed her schooling at Queen Margaret’s School in Yorkshire, which included being relocated to Castle Howard, the stately home later used as a location for the Granada TV series Brideshead Revisited.

Margaret started her medical training at St Bartholomew’s Medical School, London, in 1950 as part of a mixed year of 70 students: men …