Beauty Queen Trades Crown for Stethoscope

Bhasha Mukherjee was crowned Miss England last year—but with the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the UK, she has now returned from the overseas charity work she was doing so that she can work as a doctor in her home country. Mukherjee was a junior doctor, but took a break from her career to compete in the Miss World pageant in December, representing England. She was then invited to be an ambassador for several charities, and planned to do humanitarian work until at least August. Then she started getting messages from her old colleagues.

Physicians at the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, eastern England, described how difficult a time they were having, and Mukherjee told the hospital she wanted to come back. "I wanted to come back home. I wanted to come and go straight to work," she tells CNN. "I felt a sense of this is what I'd got this degree for and what better time to be part of this particular sector than now?" After eight days of self-quarantine in India, per the Times of India, she got back to the UK on Wednesday via a special flight, and will self-quarantine for up to two more weeks before she returns to work. Her specialty? Respiratory medicine. (More coronavirus stories.)