Endell Street Military Hospital - WW1

Spanish Flu Influenza Pandemic 1918 - 1920 - tgw > .

The Women Doctors Who Fought to Serve in World War I:

“No Man’s Land” tells the story of the Endell Street Military Hospital, which treated the casualties of war pouring into London during World War I — and which, except for the occasional male orderly, was staffed entirely by women.
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This was as shocking as it was revolutionary. Women doctors were almost unheard-of. Barred from studying at most institutions except for the London School of Medicine for Women, they were relegated to low-status, low-paying jobs in schools, prisons and asylums; most treated only other women and children. None of the men who would come to the Endell Street hospital had ever been treated by a woman before.

Two pioneering doctors — Louisa Garrett Anderson, a 41-year-old surgeon whose mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first woman ever to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and Flora Murray, 45, an exacting Scottish anesthesiologist — saw a vacuum, and rushed to fill it. The upending of conventions necessitated by the war, as well as the desperate need for new hospital beds to treat the tens of thousands of injured and sick soldiers converging on London, offered the perfect opportunity to prove that women were equal to men.

Both women were also passionate suffragists, and the struggle for the vote went hand in hand with the struggle for professional acceptance. (They also lived together, though their careers were so interesting that their sex lives seem almost beside the point.)

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The first casualties arrived in May, 1915, in convoys of up to 80 men at a time; by the end of the first week, all 520 beds were filled. Typically, between 400 and 800 new patients would arrive each month, many needing immediate surgery (much of it performed by Anderson), many with grievously infected wounds, many suffering from acute shell-shock, “more wounded in their minds than in their bodies.”

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Exhausted, worked to the bone, forced to improvise and develop new techniques on the fly, the women proved themselves capable of handling nearly everything thrown at them during the war. The Spanish flu brought them to the point of despair. It came in three waves during 1918 and 1919 and killed between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population.

Medical | Endell Street Military Hospital ..