Throughout the 1860s a frail young European woman with a medicine chest was a conspicuous presence at the women's ghats of the river Yamuna in Delhi. This was Priscilla Winter, an Anglican missionary who had absolutely no training in medicine. Missionaries like Winter were quite common in European colonies in the nineteenth century. Well before qualified doctors and nurses became familiar figures on the mission scene, many ordinary missionaries made attempts to relieve symptoms of sickness in communities surrounding their stations.

Priscilla Winter had arrived in Delhi in 1858 to join the Union Society For The Propagation of Gospel (uspg) order there. Her original duties were to spread the word of the Gospel among the women of the city. But the Delhi Mission News