Born in Bootle, Lancashire

Maud Chadburn was born on 6 November 1886 in Bootle, a town in Lancashire, England, close to Liverpool. She grew up in an era when access to higher education and professional careers for women was extremely limited, particularly in the field of medicine, which was still overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Her birth into a middle-class English family provided her with the opportunity, unusual for women of her generation, to pursue secondary and eventually medical education. The circumstances of her early life set the stage for a career that would see her become one of the pioneering female surgeons and anaesthetists in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.

Chadburn's generation of women were among the first to benefit from the gradual opening of medical schools to female students in Britain, following the efforts of pioneers such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake in the decades prior. Her birth date situates her as part of the cohort of women doctors who would go on to serve during the First World War and build institutions dedicated to women's medical practice and treatment, most notably at the South London Hospital for Women and Children.