Wendy Moore: The Women Behind Endell Street Military Hospital

When the First World War broke out in 1914 dozens of women doctors offered their services – but they were told by the British Army to “Go home and sit still”. Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson refused to sit still. Both qualified doctors and suffragettes – and also life partners – they took a unit of women doctors and nurses to Paris. They ran a hospital there so successfully that the army invited them to open a hospital in Boulogne and then – in May 1915 – to run a major military hospital in the heart of London. Endell Street was unique.

It was the only hospital within the British Army to be staffed by women – all the doctors, nurses and orderlies were female apart from a dozen or so male helpers. The women of Endell Street treated 26,000 wounded – the vast majority of them men – who were shipped back from the frontline in France, Gallipoli and elsewhere throughout the war. After the war, the hospital remained open to treat victims of the Spanish flu. Endell Street became renowned as the most popular hospital in the First World War – but that did nothing to help its women pioneers when peace came.

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