Mary Glowrey was born at Birregurra in the Western District of Victoria on 23 June 1887 and won a scholarship to secondary school in Melbourne. She studied at the University of Melbourne, graduating in medicine in 1910 and taking her doctorate of medicine in 1919, and practised in Melbourne at a time when women doctors were few. In 1916 she became the first president of the Catholic Women's Social Guild. On 24 October 1915 she had been given a pamphlet on the want of medical care in India, and she took it as a call.
On 21 January 1920 she left her practice and sailed for Guntur in southern India. On 27 May she entered the Society of Jesus, Mary and Joseph there — its first postulant in India — taking the name Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart. To go on practising medicine as a religious she needed the Pope's leave, and in October 1920 Benedict XV gave it, making her, in the Dicastery's words, 'the first sister, doctor and missionary'.
The dispensary she opened at Guntur became a hospital in 1925, and she gathered the Catholic hospitals of the country into the association that is now the Catholic Health Association of India. She worked in India for thirty-seven years and died of bone cancer at Bangalore on 5 May 1957.
The bishop of Guntur held the diocesan inquiry into her life between 2014 and 2017. On 21 November 2025 Leo XIV approved the decree of her heroic virtues, and she became Venerable — not yet Blessed, which would need a recognised miracle.