Reminiscences / [Mary Scharlieb].

Scharlieb, Mary (Mary Ann Dacomb Bird), Dame, 1845-1930.

Date:: 1925

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reminiscences / [Mary Scharlieb]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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REMINISCENCES CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL—MARRIAGE The interest of my life seems to me to be bound up with the Medical Women’s Movement, but we know that the interest of a play is enhanced when we are told something of the personalities of the actors. Therefore it is my duty to furnish a short account of my life up to the time that I began to take my share in professional work. My father, William Candler Bird, came of a Suffolk family settled since the seventeenth century at Earl Stonham, near Ipswich. My grandfather, George Bird, came to London at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and started dyeing and bleaching works at Bethnal Green, then a rural place. Unfortunately he died at the early age of forty-nine, when my father was only seventeen years of age, and there seems to have been no one to keep the business together. My grandmother was better at spending than in making or saving money. My mother’s father came from a Dorsetshire family. I was born in London in the spacious days of the B