Born into raffish Polish-Russian gentry in 1870, Vera Gedroits resisted convention from an early age. Passionate and rebellious, she wore cropped hair and trousers and, aged fourteen, persuaded her parents to let her volunteer – as was fashionable amongst the progressive young – at a local clinic. Dispensing and bandaging, she found her vocation.

As Miranda Seymour’s lively and well-written new book makes clear, it was not smooth going. Aged nineteen, Vera left for St Petersburg to study anatomy, but falling in with dissident circles, she was soon detained by police and expelled from the city. Undeterred, she made a marriage of convenience with a friend, which allowed her to continue her medical studies in Switzerland – the only country besides France where it was possible for a woman to do so. Five years on she left behind a lover (Ricky, her Swiss landlady’s daughter) and returned home to a job, arranged by her father, in a local factory hospital. It was a misstep. Lonely and locked in conflict with her bosses over the factory’s dreadful working conditions, she cracked when Ricky wrote to say that she could not join Vera in Russia. A suicide attempt – a shot to the chest with a Browning pistol – failed, and it was a relief, when Russia declared war on Japan the following year, to sign up with a Red Cross hospital train in Manchuria.

Her six months on the front line, during which she operated on 1,255 patients and led a last-minute evacuation through shelling, were a turning point. The report she presented to a medical conference on her return – the only such by a battlefield surgeon – was authoritative, full of practical