Obituary DR. I. M. MEARS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28284, 23 May 1957, Page 2

Obituary DR. I. M. MEARS

Dr. Isabella Mary Mears, who died in Christchurch yesterday, was a member of a well-known medical family in Great Britain. Born in Tynemouth, ’England, Dr. Mears was educated in Edinburgh, and after leaving School did a course as a physical training instructor in England. She then decided to take up medicine and graduated M. 8., Cn.B. from Edinburgh University. For about 25 years Dr. Mears was assistant-medical superintendent of the Astley Ainslie Hospital, Edinburgh, the convalescent hospital for the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. She then did psychological medicine in Edinburgh, and after retiring from this work came to New Zealand about four years ago to visit her nephew, Dr. Kenneth Mears, of Amberley. For more than two years, Dr Isabella Mears was in the school medical service of the Health Department, visiting schools throughout Canterbury. Both her parents were doctors and spent some years in China as medical missionaries. Their daughter was with them in China On returning to Britain, Dr. Isabella Mears’s mother, whose name was twenty-fifth on the women’s medical register in Britain, started one of the first open-air tuberculosis sanatoria in Edinburgh. Dr. Isabella Mears’s brother, Sir Frank Mears, who died in Christchurch some four years ago, was a past-president of the Royal Scottish Academy,