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Elsie Inglis was born in India in 1864. When her father retired from his job in 1878 the Inglis family returned to Scotland and settled in Edinburgh.
Inglis studied medicine at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. When the founder of the school, Sophia Jex-Blake, dismissed two students for what Inglis considered to be a trivial offence, she obtained funds from her father and some of his wealthy friends, and established her own medical college in Edinburgh. As well as studying medicine at the Edinburgh Medical College, Elsie was also trained at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
After qualifying as a doctor, Inglis was appointed to a teaching post at the New Hospital for Women by its founder, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She eventually returned to Scotland where she established in Edinburgh a maternity hospital that was staffed entirely by women. A supporter of universal suffrage, Inglis joined the NUWSS and in 1906 and played an important role in setting up the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Inglis suggested that women's medical units should be allowed to serve on the Western Front. Although the War Office representative in Scotland opposed the idea, Dr. Inglis and her Scottish Women's Hospitals Committee sent the first women's medical unit to France three months after the war started. By 1915 the Scottish Women's Hospital Unit had established an Auxiliary Hospital with 200 beds in the 13th century Royaumont Abbey. Her team included Evelina Haverfield, Ishobel Ross and Cicely Hamilton.
In April 1915 Elsie Inglis took a women's medical unit to Serbia. During an Austrian offensive in the summer of 1915, Inglis was captured but eventually, with the help of American diplomats, the British authorities were able to negotiate the release of Inglis and her medical staff.
During the First World War Inglis arranged fourteen medical units to serve in France, Serbia, Corsica, Salonika, Romania, Russia and Malta. In August 1916, the London Suffrage Society financed Inglis and eighty women to support Serbian soldiers fighting in Russia. One government official who saw the doctors and nurses working in Russia remarked that: "No wonder England is a great country if the women are like that."
Inglis was taken ill while in Russia and was forced to travel back to Britain. Elsie Inglis arrived at Newcastle Upon Tyne on 25th November, but local doctors were unable to save her and she died the following day.
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(1) Dr. I. Hutton described the state of the patients that the women nursed at the Royaumont Abbey Hospital.
It was bitterly cold. The patients who were not in a raging fever shivered and tried vainly to adjust their tattered uniforms to gain a little warmth. Their clothing crawled with maggots and bugs and their bodies with lice. Dying men lay huddled so closely together on the floor that they touched each other. Others sat up gasping and blue in the throes of pneumonia. Blood and pus oozed from the wounds. A few of the patients feebly extended their hands but most of them were too ill to care what happened. Seventy-odd soldiers, in the last stages of dysentery lay crouched along the walls, emaciated, dying. They crawled outside from time to time. There were no sanitary arrangements and the grass plot was foul.
(2) Government official commenting on the Women's Medical Unit working at Costanza (1917)
It is extraordinary how these women endure hardships; they refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies. No wonder England is a great country if the women are like that.
(3) In May 1917 Florence Farmborough met Dr. Elsie Inglis and her nurses at a hospital in Podgaytsy.
There is an English hospital in Podgaytsy, run by a group of English nurses, under the leadership of an English lady-doctor (Dr. Elsie Inglis). I was very glad to chat with them in my mother-tongue and above all to learn the latest news of the allied front in France.
They are very nice women, those English and Scottish nurses. They all have several years of training behind them. I feel distinctly raw in comparison, knowing that a mere six-months' course as a VAD in a military hospital would, in England, never have been considered sufficient to graduate to a Front Line Red Cross Unit. They could not believe that I had experienced all those nightmare months of the Great Retreat of 1915, as well as the Offensive of 1916. "You don't look strong enough to have gone through all that, said the lady-doctor, "and too young," she added, "I don't think I should have chosen you for my team." I secretly rejoiced that I had my training in Russia!"
I was surprised and not a little perturbed when I saw that tiny bags, containing pure salt, are sometimes deposited into the open wound and bandaged tightly into place. It is probably a new method; I wonder if it has been tried out on the Allied Front.
These bags of salt - small though they are - must inflict excruciating pain; no wonder the soldiers kick and yell; the salt must burn fiercely into the lacerated flesh. It is certainly a purifier, but surely a very harsh one!
At an operation, performed by the lady-doctor, at which I was called upon to help, the man had a large open wound in his left thigh. All went well until two tiny bags of salt was placed within it, and then the uproar began. I thought the man's cries would lift the roof off; even the lady doctor looked discomforted. "Silly fellow," she ejaculated. "It's only a momentary pain. Foolish fellow! He doesn't know what is good for him."
(4) In her diary Ishobel Ross , a member of the Scottish Women's Hospital Unit recorded visiting the Balkan Front with Elsie Inglis (15th February, 1917)
Mrs. Ingles and I went up behind the camp and through the trenches. It was so quiet with just the sound of the wind whistling through the tangles of wire. What a terrible sight it was to see the bodies half buried and all the place strewn with bullets, letter cases, gas masks, empty shells and daggers. We came across a stretch of field telephone too. It took us ages to break up the earth with our spades as the ground was so hard, but we buried as many bodies as we could. We shall have to come back to bury more as it is very tiring work.
(5) Arthur Balfour, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1917)
Elsie Inglis was a wonderful compound of enthusiasm, strength of purpose and kindliness. In the history of this World War, alike by what she did and by the heroism, driving power and the simplicity by which she did it, Elsie Inglis has earned an everlasting place of honour.
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