Isabel Kerr

Isabella Kerr was born in Gollachy, Enzie in Banffshire (now Moray), Scotland on 30 May 1875. Her parents were Mary Garden and John Bain Gunn, a farmer. She studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen receiving her MB ChB in 1903.[2]

She met the Reverend George McGlashan Kerr, a former joiner, who had returned from being a missionary in Southern Rhodesia. They married in 1903, and worked together in England until the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society sent them to Hyderabad in India in 1907.[3]

At their mission, she and her husband worked on unrelated work[3] but they both realised that the treatment of patients with leprosy was inadequate. In 1911, Kerr opened a leprosy centre at the mission in Nizamabad, Telangana, but in time, it attracted more patients than the it could accommodate. She received a donation from the Nizam of Hyderabad to help build the Victoria Treatment Hospital on donated land at Dichpali, and in 1915, this larger and more permanent facility opened.[2][4] By the early 1920s, the hospital had grown to more than 120 buildings.[2]

She worked with Ernest Muir who had piloted the use of hydrocarbons to treat leprosy. Their centre at Dichpali was seen as leading the campaign against leprosy. She and her husband were awarded Kaisar-i-Hind Medals in 1923.[3]

Kerr died suddenly in 1932. Her husband remained in India until 1938 when he retired to Scotland.[3] In the 1960s, the leprosy centre that she founded had over 400 patients.[4] The papers of Kerr and her husband are held in University of Edinburgh.[5]

• Kaisar-i-Hind Medal, 1923