About the author
Grace McKee
Born in Bangalore, schooled across half of India, trained in medicine at seventeen, and settled, eventually, five minutes from her daughter in Surrey.
Grace McKee spent a working life reading the shapes of cells down a microscope, deciding whether what she saw was ordinary, uncertain or dangerous. She has written a memoir that does something similar with her own life: looking closely, naming what is there, and refusing to make it prettier than it was.
A childhood in Bangalore. A boarding school where she was the youngest in every class. Medical school at seventeen, New York at twenty-four, and then seven years she did not choose. Afterwards: a consultant post, three textbooks and a chair at Harvard.
She lives in Guildford with her husband Phillip, paints in oils, and wrote this book for her three children.
A life in brief
Eight things worth knowing
The outline only. The story itself is in the book.
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01
She grew up without a father, in a house full of women
Bangalore, in a headmistress’s bungalow shared with aunts, cousins and the grandmother at the centre of everything.
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02
Her mother was made a headmistress at twenty-six
Remarkable in a school system that reserved such posts for British women, and it meant they moved, again and again, right across India.
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03
She left school at thirteen
Placed three classes ahead of her age at Barnes High School, Deolali, she sat her Cambridge examinations with girls three years older.
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04
She was one of fifty admitted to Vellore
Christian Medical College took twenty-five women and twenty-five men a year. She was the youngest, and left with a gold medal in medicine.
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05
She was told to give up medicine
What followed took seven years out of her career. It is the hardest part of the book, and the part she was least sure about writing.
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06
She wrote to the BMA and asked how to come back
Three children, no recent practice, and a registrar post she had no experience for. She got it, and opened a bank account in her own name on the way home.
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07
She became a consultant, a teacher and an author
Consultant cytopathologist at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, founder of a regional training school, and the author of three medical textbooks.
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08
She was appointed Associate Professor at Harvard
Working at Massachusetts General Hospital, roughly nine thousand kilometres and one lifetime from the garden in Bangalore.
From the albums
A few faces
And afterwards
She took up painting in her sixties
A live oil demonstration at an art show in Sedona, a foundation class the following week, and then studios in Colorado, Tuscany and a French attic.
Her work has been shown at the Sedona Arts Center, taken into a juried exhibition in Florida, and represented by a gallery in Cottonwood, Arizona.
Grace McKeeAll obstacles can be overcome and dreams can be fulfilled by sheer determination.