The fate of Rose Anna Shedlock (c1850–1878) and the early career of Émile Roux (1853–1933).

The 1878 marriage of Rose Anna Shedlock and Émile Roux was a closely guarded secret. Shedlock studied medicine at Edinburgh with Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912) and her fellow students but is not mentioned by name in the usual accounts of their battle for recognition by the University. Subsequently Shedlock attended the Paris medical school where she probably met Emile Roux who was attached to the military medical school of the Val-de-Grâce before his dismissal in 1876. Documentation of this episode and of Roux’s life over the next two years is fragmentary and inaccurate. Sadly, Shedlock died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1879. In a romanticized and highly inaccurate biography Roux’s niece suggested that Rose Anna contracted tuberculosis from Roux whose life was later blighted by the disease. However, Shedlock was unwell for some years before they married and it seems far more likely that she passed the disease on to him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]