Lillias Hamilton

Who was Lillias Hamilton?

Dr Lillias Anna Hamilton M.D., was an English pioneer female doctor and author. After attending Cheltenham Ladies' College, she trained first as a nurse, in Liverpool, before going on to study medicine in Scotland, qualifying as a Doctor of Medicine in 1890.

She was a court physician to Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in Afghanistan in the 1890s, and wrote a fictionalized account of her experiences in her book A Vizier's Daughter: A Tale of the Hazara War, published in 1900.

After a spell in private practice in London, she became Warden of Studley Horticultural College in the years before World War I, leaving the College in 1915 to serve in a typhoid hospital in Montenegro under the auspices of the Wounded Allies Relief Committee. Her other published works include A Nurse's Bequest, 1907.