Deeds and Words in the Suffrage Military Hospital in Endell Street

Shortly after war broke out in 1914 Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, two former members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded their own women’s hospital organization to care for soldiers wounded in the fighting. Experience in the suffrage movement had taught them what the likely reaction of the authorities would be to any offer of help from women doctors, so they applied directly to the French, who accepted their offer and assigned them a newly built hotel in Paris for their hospital. During the autumn and early winter of 1914 Murray and Anderson’s ‘‘Women’s Hospital Corps’’ successfully ran two military hospitals, in Paris and at Wimereux on the Channel coast, until January 1915, when casualties began to be evacuated to England in preference to being treated in France. In the interim, the War Office had received many favourable reports of the WHC’s achievements, with the result that at the beginning of 1915 the women were invited to return to England, and given the opportunity to run a large military hospital in the centre of London, under the Royal Army Medical Corps. This hospital, the Endell Street Military Hospital, was open from May 1915 to the end of 1919. Entirely staffed by women, and the only women’s unit run by militant suffragists, it was one of the most remarkable hospitals of the war. By any standards, the achievements of the WHC were astonishing. Their three hospitals were not only administered and staffed by women, but were founded specifically to treat male patients, of whom they had very little experience. The medicine and surgery of the FirstWorldWar bore no resemblance to the civilian medicine that these women had trained for and practised up until 1914: clinical experience in women’s hospitals could not have prepared them to deal with convoys of large numbers of severely injured men, many