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 –…