 Florence Fenwick Miller was the eldest daughter of John Miller, a merchant sea-captain, and of Eleanor Miller née Estabrook, daughter of a railway engineer.Privately educated as a child, she read for a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh from 1871, in the year following the Edinburgh Seven, the first females to be admitted to the course.Like the Seven, she was unable to pursue clinical practise and Edinburgh declined to award a degree to her.