In 1920, as part of an exhibition on women’s war work, the Imperial War Museum planned to display a sketch of a busy operating theatre at Endell Street Military Hospital in London. The hospital’s commanding officers, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, were furious, convinced that the depiction of a discarded splint and other clutter would damage the future professional reputation of women in medicine. “We would rather have no record of our work than a false record,” they raged.
One hundred years on, this compelling book at last gives Endell Street its due. It’s the story of the remarkable wartime contribution of two medical women who, as active suffragettes, had previously been enemies of the state. Life partners Murray and Anderson were qualified doctors who met while waging a women’s war against the British government. Anderson refused to pay tax and spent four weeks at Holloway prison after smashing a window in a smart part of London in 1912. Murray risked her medical career by speaking out against the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.
The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action. Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive x-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. Reports of the women’s success reached the War Office, and in early 1915 Murray and Anderson were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.
Endell Street was the only British army hospital to be staffed and run entirely by women for the duration of the war. Their combat years gave Murray and Anderson the toughness and organisational skills required to turn a crumbling former workhouse in Covent Garden into a 573-bed hospital, find an all-female team of doctors, trained nurses and orderlies, and run things with suffrage-minded efficiency. “Deeds Not Words” was Endell Street’s motto, and all the wards were given names of female saints rather than military-style numbers, apart from the “Johnnie Walker ward” in the basement, where drunks were put to sober up.
Endell Street was unlike any other military hospital. Its wards were decorated with colourful quilts and fresh flowers, as part of the psychological techniques promoted by Anderson to heal men often “more wounded in their minds than in their bodies”. There was a library of more than 5,000 books and a rolling programme of outings and entertainments. Convalescing soldiers were taught needlework, and curious visitors saw “burly butchers and miners working at their stitching frames with all the dexterity of Jane Austen characters”. Murray welcomed press publicity as a way of promoting the hospital’s feminist agenda, but was adamant that Endell Street should not be downplayed as “women’s work”, with all its unprofessional implications, in the planned national war museum. “Hands off our Hospital in the Women’s Section!” she stated.
Throughout the war Endell Street admitted between 400 and 800 cases a month, and treated more than 24,000 patients. Wendy Moore vividly depicts the convoys of seriously wounded soldiers arriving straight from the battlefields in France in the hospital’s courtyard in the middle of the night, most requiring immediate surgery. Chief surgeon Anderson and her team pioneered successful treatments including an antiseptic ointment to heal septic wounds and prevent amputations. Moore is superb at describing the medical advances that resulted in seven research papers by Endell Street doctors being published in The Lancet, among the first ever by women.
With the end of the war in sight, however, there was a cruel twist that has a chilling relevance today. In June 1918 a young Endell Street doctor noted “a most peculiar new disease” spreading through patients and staff, and wondered if it would alter the “fate of nations”. She was right. The hospital team that had saved thousands from death and permanent disability during the war was helpless in the fight against the waves of Spanish flu that killed many of its younger staff.
After the hospital closed in 1919, the UK’s medical schools went back to barring female students, and female doctors were sidelined once again into low-paid, low-status jobs. Winston Churchill, the new secretary of state for war, refused to give female army doctors equal military rank, “nor will their services be required beyond the present emergency”.
At the Imperial War Museum the offending sketch disappeared (suffragette direct action, perhaps?), and a respectful oil painting of Endell Street surgeons at work now hangs in the museum’s only room dedicated to women’s war work. It’s a fine picture, but Murray and Anderson never wanted women in medicine to be put in a corner.
• Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital by Wendy Moore is published by Atlantic (RRP £17.99).
