Agnes Marshall Cowan MRCOG (19 April 1880–22 August 1940) was a Scottish physician who was one of the first fully qualified female physicians in the UK, and a medical missionary in Manchuria during the Manchurian plague. She oversaw medical issues in the "Devil's Porridge" explosive factory at Gretna serving the demand for explosives during the First World War.
In 1934 she was the first Scottish female to be granted a professorship, but not until 1940 was a professorship granted within Scotland itself (Margaret Fairlie).
Life
She was born on 19 April 1880 in Edinburgh the daughter of Marion Dickson Wallace (1851–1932) and John Cowan. She was the sixth of eleven children and the family lived in a large stone villa in the Grange district in the south of the city.
Cowan was one of the first female students admitted to the University of Edinburgh and studied medicine alongside Jessie Gellatly, Mabel L. Ramsay and others. They all graduated MB ChB in July 1906.
Following graduation in the summer of 1906 she and Jessie Gellatly joined the staff at Leith Hospital in north Edinburgh, the first hospital to accept female physicians.
She parted company with her friend Jessie around 1908 and went to work as a surgeon at the Eye Department of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In the summer of 1911 she was motivated to leave Scotland and travelled to China as a medical missionary to address the outbreak of pneumonia in the north, known in the UK as the Manchurian plague. She was part of a large British contingent requested by the Chinese physician Wu Lien-teh to address the disaster.
In 1914 she was working in a hospital at Ashiho near Harbin. In 1915 she moved to a Mukden Medical College to work with fellow Edinburgh physician Dugald Christie. Both of these ventures were financially supported jointly by the Church of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. Manchuria at this time was under Imperial Russian influence and the overall environment of both plague and political unrest was far from easy. The area was also troubled by bandits who would raid the towns and hospitals and would sometimes take equipment and medicine. Nevertheless, Cowan stayed for many years before being forced to leave in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917.