World War One: Endell Street hospital's suffragette surgeons

Endell Street military hospital during World War One — Image caption,
The Endell Street Military Hospital in London was opened in May 1915 by militant suffragists Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson.

Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson

Jennian Geddes, historian and retired doctor, said that at the beginning of World War One Dr Murray and Dr Garrett Anderson (2nd and 3rd from left) had been running “a couple of small hospitals in France for three or four months” and were invited to open the hospital, which eventually had 573 beds.

A nurse and two orderlies dressing patients’ wounds at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

They were given the former St Giles and St George’s workhouse, which had been refurbished and turned into a hospital by the War Office

A Home Sister working at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

The hospital was staffed entirely by women and over five years it dealt with more than 26,000 patients

Nancy Cook making a prosthesis for a leg amputee at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

The female surgeons at the hospital often carried out 20 operations a day on wounded troops, included amputations. In this picture Nancy Cook is making a prosthesis for a leg amputee

Dr Winifred Buckley who worked as a surgeon at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

Dr Winifred Buckley, pictured, became one of the surgeons. “The War Office was running out of male doctors [so] they needed to fall back on the women who, at the beginning of the war, they had dismissed and basically said ‘Go home and knit dear’,” Lesley Hall, from the Wellcome Library said

A female orderly kitting out two patients in the clothing store at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

Many of the women doctors had only just graduated, Dr Geddes said, and working at the hospital was “a baptism of fire”

Unloading stores under direction of Quartermaster, Olga Campbell, at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

“What Dr Murray and Dr Garrett Anderson wanted to do was to show that women could do the job as well as men without the world collapsing, and they did,” Dr Geddes said

The kitchens at Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One

“Immediately after the war, women doctors found themselves sidelined by men returning from the front, in the same way women who’d stepped into all the other professions did,” added Dr Geddes

Memorial plaque to Endell Street Military Hospital

In 1917, both Dr Murray and Dr Garrett Anderson received CBEs in recognition of their accomplishments