In 1905, former Honorary Secretary of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), Isabel Thorne, published a small account which celebrated thirty years of the institution. While this was intended primarily as an historical narrative describing the foundation of the School, it also contained portraits of a few illustrious and talented alumni, some of whom had died tragically pursuing their goal. The final paragraphs of the Sketch were directed firmly at the ‘successive generation of students’, those lucky ones for whom the road had ‘been cleared and the way made easy’ and whose only burden was not the individual struggle borne bravely by their predecessors but a collective weight of social and professional expectation. For the early twentieth-century female medical student, carrying ‘on the traditions handed down to them’, following ‘in the foot-steps’ of the great names meant exhibiting both skilfulness ‘in the practice of her profession, but also [as] an example to all other women for purity of mind and large heartedness’. Isabel Thorne concluded the Sketch with a flawless portrait of the ‘ideal qualities’ of the medical woman: