Robert McAllister
Stewart Peters was born in Scotland about 1860 and studied medicine at Glasgow University. He passed the first two professional exams but left the course before the final exam. He found work as a ship’s surgeon on a whaler named Resolute, which sailed to Davis Strait, between Greenland and Newfoundland, to carry out whaling for a season. There is a sequel to that later.
On his return to Dundee he decided to find work in New Zealand and sailed there on the SS Wellington in 1883. Gold had been discovered in Otago twenty-two years previously, and Dunedin, Mosgiel and Outram were thriving as support centres for fortune hunters on their way to the goldfields. [Read more…]
In March 1917, a school leaver called Frances McAllister travelled from her North Island home to the southern city of Dunedin. She was one of seven or eight females among thirty new entrants at the Otago Medical School. (The 1917 intake was much smaller than usual due to military conscription.) McAllister graduated as a doctor in 1922. Her memoir (published under her married name Frances Preston), Lady Doctor, Vintage Model, is a fascinating window into New Zealand life in the first half of the twentieth century. As the blurb puts it:
In 1976, Professor Cyril Dixon, Head of the 
