Grace Helen Newell M.B. B.S. M.F.Hom (4 February 1899 – 23 June 1979) was an English homeopathic physician and medical missionary. For over two decades she was a Council Member of the Faculty of Homeopathy.

Grace Helen Newell was born on 4 February 1899, in Cusco, Peru, the daughter of missionary William Hewett Newell (1870 – 1902) and Fanny Stransom (b. 1870).

Following the death of her father in Cusco from typhoid fever, early in 1903 Grace traveled via Colon, Panama, to Southampton aboard the R.M.S. Tagus with her mother and younger sister, Fannie Ruth [Cox] (1902 – 1976), to her grandparent’s home town of Reading, where she resumed her schooling.

In 1924, Newell graduated with her Bachelor’s in Medicine and in Science from the University of London School of Medicine for Women.

From the mid-1920s, Grace Newell served in India as a doctor with the Baptist Missionary Society. She was stationed at Berhampur, Ganjam District, along with fellow missionary physicians Dorothy Trevor Daintree (1888 – 1965) and Helen Gregory (1898 – 1946).

In April 1928, Newell was listed as a Medical Officer at the Baptist Mission Hospital in Ganjam. That month she passed the examination in Tropical Medicine, with distinction, from the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine.

In 1934, Newell resigned from her medical position with the Baptist Missionary Society and returned to England.

By 1939, Grace Newell was living at 19 Vicarage Way, Harrow, Middlesex, England.

Newell was an active member of the British Homeopathic Society, later the Faculty of Homeopathy. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and into the early 1970s, she was re-elected as a council member of the Faculty, alongside fellow homeopaths Johanna Elspeth Gertrude Brieger (1920 – 2005), Marjorie Grace Blackie, Anita Davies, Sidney Hanson Dunce, Douglas Medlicott Gibson, Marianne Harling, Charles Oliver Kennedy, John Fraser Kerr, Michael David McCready,  John Robertson Raeside, John Disney Rear (1903 – 1968), Andrew Ernest Strigner, William Lees Templeton, Llewelyn Ralph Twentyman, William Thomson Walker, and Sir John Weir.

Grace Helen Newell died at her home, Sandridge House, 1 Sandridge Road, St Albans, on 23 June 1979, aged 80.

Of Interest:

In 1918, towards the end of World War I, Grace Newell’s Berhampur colleague, Dorothy Daintree, was appointed as a surgeon to the Endell Street Military Hospital in Covent, Garden, London. It is not known whether Daintree practiced homeopathically but, at Endell Street, she worked alongside another homeopath, ENT consultant Octavia Lewin.

Henry Newell Guernsey M.D. (1817 – 1885) [no relation] was an American homeopath and author of The Application of the Principles and Practice of Homoeopathy (1867)

Thomas H. Newell M.D. (born c. 1831) [no relation] was an American eclectic physician who practiced in New York City in the 1870s.

Percy Newell L.R.C.P. L.M. L.R.C.S.I. (3 December 1861 – 1945) [no evident relation], was an orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy. In 1895-6, he was a subscriber to the London Homeopathic Hospital annual report. He practiced at Sillwood Place, Crowborough, Sussex, and later took over from homeopath George William Chapman in Margate, practicing at 74 Harold Road, Cliftonville, Margate. In 1911, he was elected a member of the British Homeopathic Society.