Joyce Alexander (née Garven) was born in 1935 to Scottish missionary parents in Manchuria, northern China under Japanese occupation. After the outbreak of World War II, the family was evacuated to Vancouver and returned to Glasgow in 1944. Her father returned to China between 1946 and 1948 to help rebuild Mukden Medical College, but was forced out after the Communist takeover and became a Reader in Pathology at the University of Glasgow. Joyce studied medicine in Glasgow, where she met her husband Douglas, a theology student. After graduating and completing her homework, she accompanied Douglas to New York, where he studied and trained at an East Harlem parish while she worked in pathology at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1961 they returned to Scotland where she worked in anesthetics in Greenock. She later moved to community medicine in Glasgow, working mainly with...