Agnes Yewande Savage

Agnes Yewande Savage (1906-1964) was a Nigerian-Scottish physician and the first West African woman to train and qualify in Western medicine. She earned her medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1929 at the age of twenty-three, graduating with first-class honours and becoming the first woman at Edinburgh to win both a prize in diseases of the skin and a medal in forensic medicine in the same year. She went on to work in the colonial medical service in Ghana and helped establish the Korle-Bu Nurses' Training College in Accra, where a ward was later named in her honor. Her career combined outstanding personal academic achievement with sustained work to expand medical education and women's healthcare in West Africa despite the racial and gender barriers of her time.