Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird was a clergyman's daughter from Yorkshire who suffered from her childhood onwards with back pain, insomnia and depression. Doctors removed a tumour from her spine when she was eighteen and, when she remained unwell, suggested a sea voyage. Her father gave her a hundred pounds and told her to stay away as long as it lasted. At home she was an invalid on a sofa; abroad, she found, she could ride forty miles a day.

In 1872, in her forties and after her parents had died, she set off again. In Hawaii she climbed Mauna Loa; in Colorado she rode alone through the Rocky Mountains in winter, befriended a one-eyed outlaw called Rocky Mountain Jim and climbed Longs Peak with him. Her letters to her sister Henrietta became A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. In 1878 she travelled through the northern interior of Japan, staying in villages no European had described, and wrote about the Ainu with more curiosity than most of her contemporaries.

After Henrietta died she married the doctor who had treated her, John Bishop; when he too died in 1886 she trained as a nurse, studied Persian and set out for India, Kashmir, Ladakh, Persia and Kurdistan, founding small hospitals in her husband's memory. In her sixties she spent three years in Korea and China, travelling up the Yangtze, and was once attacked by a mob.

She was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892, the first woman. She was planning a return to China when she died in Edinburgh at 72.