The daughter of Robert, a Dundee architect, Agnes was educated at Dundee
High School, where she won the Harris Gold Medal. In 1895 she was awarded the first MA degree awarded by St Andrews to a woman. Shortly before graduating, she and a Miss Hamilton gained entrance to University College, Dundee to study for MB, ChB, having successfully argued that Mary Ann Baxter had said women were to be equal students, and she graduated in 1898. She took three successive holiday residential posts, at Glasgow Maternity Hospital, London’s Belgrave Hospital and in the London and Toxteth Workhouse in Liverpool. She then became consultant physician to St John’s Hospital for Skin Diseases and to the skin department of the South London Hospital for Women. In either 1898 or 1901 she married Dr Thomas Savill, who died in 1910. In that year she became editor of Savill’s Clinical Medicine. In World War I she was head of the electrotherapeutic department of the Scottish Women’s Hospital, Royaumont, France. She published various journal articles and medical works, and, in 1955, Alexander the Great and his Time. She has been described as “formidable”.