Born: 16 August 1864, India
Died: 26 November 1917
Country most active: United Kingdom, International
Also known as: NA
Sara Sheridan on Maria Graham and creative memorialization transcript
Born and raised in India, Elsie Inglis was both the product of and an agent for advances for women in medicine in the late 1800s and early 1900s. After her family’s return to Scotland, she went on to study at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, which was founded by Sophia Jex-Blake. Jex-Blake was one of the Edinburgh Seven, along with Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell. The women had fought to attend medical school and were the first to do so in the U.K., only to later be told they would not be granted degrees. Most of the women went on to earn medical degrees in other countries.
However, perhaps due to her own experiences, Jex-Blake was considered by many students to be too harsh and strict, and those tensions came to a head when she dismissed two students, sisters Ina and Grace Cadell, without grounds and they sued. Elsie had left with the Cadells, but they didn’t go far: her father launched a rival Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women in 1889. After Scottish universities opens to women in 1892, both women’s medical schools closed in 1898 (the School of Medicine) and 1908 (the College).
Inglis herself had long since moved on, working at a hospital in London after earning her medical qualifications in 1892. Unhappy with the poor standards, particularly for female patients, she felt that women-run hospitals were the best option, and returned to Edinburgh in 1894 to start her own practice with another woman doctor. In 1904, she founded a small maternity hospital for low-income women on the city’s High Street. Staffed entirely by women, it would later evolve into the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, which officially opened in 1925 in Inglis’s honor (she had died in 1917) and remained open until 1988.
Her concern for the lack of quality care available to women also contributed to her women’s rights activism. Elsie was a long-time member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and was the founding secretary of the Scottish Women’s Suffragette Federation from 1906 until 1914.
When World War I broke out in 1914, she proposed the creation of woman-staffed medical units to work on the Western Front. Despite being rejected by both the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps, she established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service. While the British War Office opposed her plans, the French government was more receptive and by November, the first medical team was setting up a hospital at Calais to support the Belgian army, followed the next month by the Abbaye de Royaumont hospital, a 200-bed facility in Val-d’Oise. By the end of the war, 14 units had served in Corsica, France, Malta, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia. Elise joined a unit in Serbia in early 1915, but was taken captive by Austrian forces. Released in 1916 following international pressure, she returned to Britain to raise funds for a unit in Odessa (then part of Russia), and led the team when it was dispatched that August. She served for a year, but had to return to Britain due to her failing health, shortly before dying from cancer in November 1917.
For years in Edinburgh, Elsie had lived with, and is believed to have been in a romantic relationship with, her fellow doctor and suffragette Flora Murray.