Ida Scudder & the Night of Three Deaths

Home in India from her studies in America, Ida Scudder — born into a long line of medical missionaries — was called on in a single night by three men whose wives lay dying in childbirth; each refused a male doctor, and by morning all three women were dead. She said that night decided her life. She trained as a physician, opened a one-room clinic at Vellore in 1900, and built it into the Christian Medical College — one of Asia's great hospitals, born of care for the sick in an age of famine and epidemic.

Her own account and standard biographies; Vellore / CMC records.