Elsie Inglis

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Inglis returned to Edinburgh in 1894, completed her medical degree and became a lecturer in gynaecology at the Medical College for Women and then set up a medical practice with Jessie MacLaren MacGregor, who had been a fellow student. Considering that women and children's medicine was under resourced, they opened a maternity hospital, named The Hospice, for poor women alongside a midwifery resource and training centre, initially in George Square. The Hospice was then provided with an accident and general service as well as maternity, with an operating theatre and eight beds, in new premises at 219 High Street, on the Royal Mile, close to Cockburn Street, and was the forerunner of the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital. In 1913, Inglis travelled across to the USA (Michigan) to visit and learn from a new type of maternity hospital.

Inglis often waived the fees owed to her and would pay for her patients to recuperate by the sea-side, with polio being a particular childhood illness she was concerned with. Inglis was a consultant at Bruntsfield Hospital, a nearby hospital for women and children, and the Hospice merged with them in 1910.

Inglis's surgical skills were recognised by colleagues as “she was quiet, calm, and collected, and never at a loss, skilful in her manipulations, and able to cope with any emergency.”

Inglis lived and was in a relationship for some time with Flora Murray, a fellow doctor and suffragette.

Her dissatisfaction with the standard of medical care available to women led her to political activism through the suffrage movement. She was the secretary of the Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage in the 1890s, supported by her father, and while she was working toward her medical degree.

Inglis worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, the leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS), speaking at events all over the country. By 1906, "Elsie Inglis was to the Scottish groups what Mrs. Fawcett was to the English; when they too formed themselves that year into a Federation, it was Elsie who became its secretary." From the early years of the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies, Inglis was honorary secretary from 1906 and continued in this role right up to 1914.

Inglis spoke in support of suffrage in 1907 with Chrystal MacMillan and Alice Low as fellow speakers, at a NUWSS meeting in Edinburgh's Café Oak Hall. Jessie Scott from New Zealand, where women already had the vote was also a guest speaker.

A century later, in The Lancet, Lucy Inglis (a relative) noted Inglis had said 'fate had placed her in the van of a great movement' and was a 'keen fighter'. Inglis's personal style was described by fellow suffragist Sarah Mair as 'courteous, sweet-voiced' with 'the eyes of a seer', a 'radiant smile' when her lips were not 'firmly closed with a fixity of purpose such as would warn off unwarrantable opposition or objections...'

Although she had already had turned 50 at the start of the conflict, it was during the First World War that she made her mark. Despite government resistance, Inglis established the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service Committee, an organisation funded by the women's suffrage movement to provide all female staffed relief hospitals for the Allied war effort, including doctors and technical staff (paid) and others including nurses and transport staff and others as volunteers.

Inglis wanted a neutral name in order to attract "wide support from men and women". but was able to use her connections to the suffrage movement to raise money for what became the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH). Inglis approached the Scottish Red Cross to help with funding, but the head of the Scottish Red Cross, Sir George Beatson denied Inglis’ request stating that the Red Cross was in the hands of the War Office and he could have “nothing to say to a hospital staffed by women.” To start the project, “she opened a fund with £100 of her own money.” Milicent Fawcett, of NUWSS took up the cause and invited Inglis to speak about the SWH in London, and by the next month, Inglis had her first £1,000. The goal was £50,000. Collection boxes had the NUWSS logo in small print, one is held in the National Museum of Scotland.

The organisation was active in sending eventually 14 teams to Belgium, France, Serbia and Russia.

When Inglis approached the Royal Army Medical Corps to offer them a ready-made medical unit staffed by qualified women, the War Office told her, "my good lady, go home and sit still." It was, instead, the French government that took up her offer and established a unit in France and then she led her own unit in Serbia. Inglis was involved in all aspects of the organisation of this service down to the colours of the uniform 'a hodden grey, with Gordon tartan facings'. The French hospital was based at the Abbey of Royaumont and was run by Frances Ivens from January 1915 to March 1919. Inglis had initially offered a 100-bed hospital but it grew to hold 600 beds as it coped with the severity of battles, including that on the Somme.

Inglis went with the teams sent to Serbia, to work in improving hygiene which reduced typhus and other epidemics there. On her journey, she was to enjoy a last peaceful day of sunshine and starlight on the voyage. The typhus outbreak in Serbia affected the hospital, and eventually took the lives of four of the SWH staff, including Nurse Louisa Jordan, after whom the coronavirus pandemic hospital in Glasgow was named in 2020. Four SWH units in Serbia were established but in 1915 Inglis was captured, when the Austro-Hungarian and German forces took over the region, as she had stayed behind with others to repatriate the wounded. Inglis was taken prisoner when at Krushevatz (Kruševac) Hospital in Serbia. Inglis and others were repatriated via neutral Switzerland in February 1916, but upon reaching Scotland, she at once began organising funds for a Scottish Women's Hospital team in Russia. She headed the Scots team when it left in August 1916 for Odessa, Russia. She had appointed two fellow Scottish suffragists, Mary H. J. Henderson as administrator, and Evelina Haverfield as commandant for the new unit. The two SWH units were overcome in the chaos of a retreat with Inglis travelling via Dobruja to Braila, on the Danube with the people in flight, including families, doctors, soldiers and a Romanian officer who had been in Glasgow and knew "British custims" (sic). The Scottish women's journeys and challenging experiences in Serbia were shared by her administrator, Henderson in national and local press and in fundraising talks once she returned home. Inglis was said, in the chaos, to think of her homeland 'there, quiet, strong and invincible, behind everything and everyone'.

At Braila with just six other doctors, only one surgeon, Inglis and team were treating 11,000 wounded soldiers and sailors. A letter in tribute to Inglis, in the name of "The Russian Citizen Soldiers" was written at Easter to "express our sincere gratitude for all the care and attention bestowed on us, and we bow low before the tireless and wonderful work of yourself and your personnel, which we see every day directed towards the good of the soldiers allied to your country". Inglis got the news that her nephew was shot in the head and blinded on the day that she was leaving for Reni (Ukraine). She questioned the eternal battle of good and evil referred to in wartime, when she wrote to her sister expressing her sorrow for her nephew, ending with "we are just here in it, and whatever we lose, it is for the right we are standing...it is all terrible and awful, and I don't believe we can disentangle it all in our minds just now. The only thing is just to go on doing our bit."

Inglis, "an indomitable little figure" lasted another summer in Russia, before she too was forced to return in poor health to the United Kingdom, dying almost on arrival, suffering from bowel cancer. On her final journey, she was seen to stand on deck saying a farewell to each of the Serb officers being evacuated "in quiet dignity."

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