Imagine being born and brought up in India with seven siblings, educated well, spending a brief time in Tasmania before being brought to Scotland, specifically Edinburgh, where you completed your education, before going to Paris for finishing school. You then decided that instead of finding a husband and producing heirs, you fancied becoming a doctor, of all things! And not just any doctor, but a doctor who also got involved with women’s suffrage, created hospitals and inspired others to follow you, then spent her last three years caring for the sick and wounded of a world war.
Meet Elsie Inglis, third oldest child of eight, and a young woman who just couldn’t abide to be told she couldn’t, or shouldn’t!
Elsie had apparently always wanted to be involved in Medicine, no doubt building on the exploits of pioneers such as Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, and her efforts to create a basis for Nursing as a career and calling. Medicine was not the easiest career to choose at a time when women of a certain upbringing were supposed to look pretty and smile.
When Elsie’s father John retired from his career in the service of the Britsh Raj culminating in being Chief Commissioner of Oudh, he took his large family firstly to Tasmania, where some of them settled, and then on to Edinburgh, where his daughter wanted to study to become a doctor. John was nothing if not supportive to his children’s whims, and in 1886 Elsie was enrolled in the ‘Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women’, newly opened by another of the pioneering female Medical Practitioners, Dr Sophia Jex-Blake. However, unfortunately for Dr Jex-Blake, there seems to have been a wide gap in the effectiveness of her as a physician, and that of a tutor, or teacher, and after a period of legal battles, scandal and upheaval, John Inglis was prominent in the creation of a rival school, ‘Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women‘ at which Elsie then continued her studies and gained her Triple Q in 1892 before spending the next couple of years working in Dublin and London. Elsie gained her Degree in Surgery and Medicine in 1899, just after the University of Edinburgh first allowed women to have them.
Elsie was becoming more and more interested in medicine for women and children and gynecology, and was led into the suffrage movement by her dissatisfaction with how women and children were treated, and how poor the funding was for women’s health. She spent time as a leader in the cause, and lectured and fundraised for many years. While running a Dr’s practice in Edinburgh with Dr Jessie MacLaren MacGregor she would invariably waive fees for poorer women patients, and was also known to fund patients recuperating at sea-side resorts.
By the start of WW1in 1914, and into her 50’s, Elsie had gone against the will of the Government and created the ‘Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service Committee’, which would go on to provide all female relief hospitals to assist the Allied war effort. Unfortunately, she was met by an official damnation of her work and ideas, and the British Government was not ready for all female hospitals at all. The red Cross refused to work with them, and there is a famous apocryphal story where some General told Elsie “My good lady, go home and sit still..”
Well, that was never going to happen!
The French Government however, was happy to deal with this mad British woman and her all-female hospital units, and eventually Elsie had set up and sent fourteen units into France and Serbia to care for wounded soldiers. Over the next three years Elsie served in France, Serbia, The Ukraine and Russia. She pulled on her acquaintances from the Suffrage Movement to help fund and man the units, and she worked alongside many of them in Serbia especially, and later in Russia. She was captured while in Serbia, being repatriated to Switzerland in 1916. She was soon back and working in Russia, but unfortunately the constant fatigue, bad conditions and stress took its toll on Elsie’s health, and in 1917 she was forced to head back home to Blighty, docking in Newcastle upon Tyne on November 25th, where she died the following day. She had bowel cancer.
The story should end there.
It doesn’t.
Elsie Inglis was given a State Funeral in Edinburgh, where she was feted as a fallen hero. Members of the British Royalty were joined by Serbian Royalty at the funeral. Thousands of people lined the streets as her body was driven around, and it seems that though she had had to battle to achieve as much as she did, once dead, she became revered by her peers and her supporters and her doubters alike. There was a memorial service held in the Houses of Commons’ Anglican church. This too was attended by British and Serbian Royalty.
Elsie has been commemorated in Serbia, Russia as well as London and Edinburgh, with buildings named after her, banknotes and stamps having her portrait on.
Many of the institutions Elsie Inglis founded have continued to carry on her work, and her attitude and spirit continue to inspire young women nowadays.
So, there we have it, the life story of a woman who was given much that women at that time could never dream of, education, career choice and freedom. When she was ignored and ridiculed by the male establishment, she got on and achieved her goals anyway, and through it all she continually called upon herself to help those who were less advantaged, less able or in pain.
Link here to see the obituary written for Elsie Inglis by Beatrice Russell. Copyright held by the National Library of Medicine, National centre for Biotechnology Information.
