Sheila Bhattacharya

Sheila Bhattacharya (née Burns) was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, in 1924. Her father, Robert Burns, a classics scholar, had been a colonial administrator in St Kitts and West Africa, while her mother, a highly independent Glaswegian woman, had served as a nurse in the first world war.

Sheila had a passion for literature and had intended to study English at university, but the onset of the second world war while she was finishing school was the great event of her life, changing her outlook. Encouraged by her mother, she decided to study medicine and got a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1942. She then decided instead to volunteer for …