Coral Sharpe: GP who fought against the prejudices of her day to become a doctor

St Bartholomew’s medical school had only been accepting female students for eight years when Coral Sharpe (née Knight) began studying in 1955. Sharpe was not an obvious trailblazer, but in her quiet, resolute way she was determined to study medicine and keep working as a doctor when society might have expected her to concentrate on being a wife and mother.

Medicine was in Sharpe’s blood. Her father, Bryant, was a GP in north west London and the whole family was immersed in the practice—Sharpe’s mother, Gladys, was, in effect, the receptionist; the waiting room was in Sharpe’s bedroom; and Sharpe, along with her sister Heather and brother Anthony were born either above or next door to the surgery.

Sharpe was, in the parlance of the time, a delicate child. She was prone to ear infections and sudden, mysterious fevers; she was also diagnosed with a heart murmur. Gladys’s letters to Bryant, who served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps in North Africa and Italy during the second world war, are full of worries for her younger daughter’s health.

Sharpe was a shy, unassuming child. When she went to see the doctor about the heart murmur she refused …