THE Edinburgh doctor Elsie Maude Inglis, dubbed Scotland's Florence Nightingale for her role in saving the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers during the First World War, is to be honoured in France.
A memorial stone, which will mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the war, will be unveiled on Friday in a ceremony at the 13th-century Abbaye de Royaumont, where she opened a 600-bed auxiliary hospital shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in
1914.
That the hospital ever saw the light of day is testament to the determination and pioneering spirit of Dr Inglis. When she approached the War Office with the idea of either women doctors co-operating with the Royal Army Medical Corps, or women's medical units being allowed to serve on the Western Front, the British authorities advised her to go home and take up knitting.
Undeterred, she dispatched two medical units to France, and, the Abbaye de Royaumont was soon functioning as the first medical facility to be opened by Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH), the organisation Dr Inglis had founded earlier in 1914, with the financial support of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and the American Red Cross.
Two Scottish suffragettes, Ishobel Ross and Cicely Hamilton, were among the team working at Royaumont, some 30km north of Paris.
Ian McFarlane, the chairman of the Scottish Women's Hospital Committee and organiser of the memorial, said: "The Abbaye de Royaumont may win plaudits today for being the most beautiful Cistercian abbey in France, but when they arrived it was a midden, with just one electric light bulb, one cold tap and one electric socket. They scrubbed the whole place from top to bottom on their hands and knees by candlelight.
"That Dr Inglis and her nurses succeeded in turning the place into a viable hospital is a major accomplishment in itself."
Dr Inglis went on to set up a total of 14 medical units during the First World War, and these treated more than 300,000 Allied troops in Corsica, France, Malta, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia, where she was taken prisoner before her release was negotiated with the help of US diplomats.
The SWH provided 1,000 women who worked as nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, cooks and orderlies. One Serbian official who saw the work of the women in Russia said: "No wonder Britain is a great country if the women are like that."
The memorial stone will be laid next to a rowan tree planted near the entrance to the abbey by the Princess Royal at a ceremony held in honour of Dr Inglis in 2005. Mr McFarlane said the stone was made of granite, as "a symbol of the durability and unwillingness to crack of these women".
Guests at the ceremony will include a delegation of British soldiers, Stewart Maxwell, the Scottish communities minister, and a representative of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.
Mr McFarlane said: "Let's face it, at that time the French just did not have women of this calibre who were trained as doctors and surgeons and who could work on the front line.
"These Scottish women were pioneering role models who undoubtedly opened the door to allow French women to pursue medical and military careers."
He went on: "There has been no mention during the 90th anniversary commemorations of the thousands of women who were present at the Somme, no mention of their achievements and generosity," adding that he hoped that the memorial to Dr Inglis would help refocus public attention on the courage of these forgotten women.
Born in India to a Scottish civil servant in 1864, Elsie Inglis returned to Scotland with her family and settled in Edinburgh, where she studied medicine, gaining her MD in 1899. Dr Inglis went on to establish the first female-run maternity hospital in Scotland.
A staunch advocate of women's rights, she helped found the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation.
She died in November 1917 from illness and exhaustion just one day after returning to Britain from Russia. She was buried with full military honours in Edinburgh.
Winston Churchill, who was munitions minister at the end of the war, said of Dr Inglis and her team: "They will shine in history."
There is a plaque to her in St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, and monuments and statues to her service have been built in many other European countries.
After the war, the Scottish Women's Hospital for Foreign Service was disbanded and its affairs were wound up in 1922. The remaining funds were used to build Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh.
PROFILE
ELSIE Maude Inglis was born in India, where her father was employed in the Indian civil service. In 1878, the familyreturned to their former home in Edinburgh. Inglis studied at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, before going on to the University of Glasgow. She qualified as a doctor in 1892. In 1894, she returned to Edinburgh to establish a medical practice with a female physician. In 1904 she set up a small maternity hospital for Edinburgh's poor in the city's High Street, st
The full article contains 858 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
