author
Graham Travers
1859–1918
Best known by the pen name Graham Travers, this Scottish doctor-turned-novelist brought sharp wit and firsthand knowledge of women’s medical education to her fiction. Her books mix social observation, professional ambition, and a lively sense of character.
2 Audiobooks
The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake
by Graham Travers
Mona Maclean, Medical Student: A Novel
by Graham Travers
About the author
Born Margaret Georgina Todd in Glasgow in 1859, she wrote fiction under the name Graham Travers while also building a career in medicine. She studied in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Berlin, and later qualified as a doctor at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women.
Her best-known novel, Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), drew on that medical world and helped make her name as a writer. She also wrote other novels and a biography of Sophia Jex-Blake, with whom she was closely associated.
Beyond literature, she is also remembered for suggesting the word "isotope" to chemist Frederick Soddy in 1913. She died in London in 1918, leaving behind a body of work shaped by both scientific training and literary skill.