Isabella Bishop (née Bird) published her Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, compiled from a series of letters home, in 1891. Recommended an open-air life from an early age as a cure for physical and nervous difficulties, Bird toured the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Far East. After her marriage, and the death of her husband in 1886, she did missionary work in India and then, in 1890, travelled to little-known parts of Turkey, Persia and Kurdistan in the company of Major Herbert Sawyer of the Indian Army. This came to be the hardest journey of her experience, with extremes of temperature and harsh living conditions for the sixty-year-old, although she was able to provide medical care for the local people.