February 29, 2024 • 42 mins
Welcome to our exploration of one of London's most extraordinary chapters from the First World War: the story of Endell Street Military Hospital, a groundbreaking institution that was not only at the forefront of medical innovation but also a testament to the indomitable spirit and resilience of women. Founded in 1915, amidst the chaos of a world at war, Endell Street stood out for being entirely run by women, from its surgeons to its orderlies. This was at a time when the medical profession was almost exclusively male-dominated, making the hospital a radical experiment in both medicine and gender equality.
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(00:01):
Welcome, dear listeners, to another fascinating episode of
the London History Podcast, where we dive into the vibrant
and diverse past of this great city.
I am your host, Hazel Baker, a qualified London tour guide and
founder of London guidedwalks.co.uk.
Whether you're a born and bred Londoner or a curious listener,
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join us on a journey through time as we explore the city
together. Each episode is supported by
show notes, transcripts, photos and further reading, all to be
found on our website. If you enjoy what we do then
you'll love our guided walks andprivate tours that we offer
throughout the year. All bookable online at
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londonguidedwalks.co.uk Subscribe now to never miss an
episode and if you enjoy the show, please leave us a review
and rating to help spread the word to other history lovers.
This week's exploration is one of London's most extraordinary
chapters from the First World War.
(01:07):
The story of Endle St. Military Hospital, a ground
breaking institution that was not only at the forefront of
medical innovation, but also shines a light on the
indomitable spirit and resilience of women.
Founded in 1915 amongst the chaos of a world at war, Endor
(01:30):
St. in Covent Garden stood out for being entirely run by women
from its surgeons to its orderlies.
This was at a time when the medical profession was almost
exclusively male dominated, making the hospital a radical
experiment in both medicine and gender equality.
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Pendle St. Military Hospital was led by two
remarkable women, Doctor Flora Murray and Doctor Louisa Garrett
Anderson, who were life partnersas well as Co founders of the
hospital. Both were suffragettes fiercely
advocating for women's rights, and they brought their
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determination and pioneering spirit to the challenge of
running a military hospital. Under their leadership, Kendall
St. treated over 26,000 patients, earning A reputation
for excellence in care and efficiency, challenging the
prejudice of the time and proving conclusively that women
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could excel in what was considered a man's world.
Joining me in the studio to delve into this fascinating but
also slightly frustrating story is Borough of Camden tour guide
Sylvia McNamara, who offers two related walking tours with us at
London Guided Walks, the first being A Tale of Two Slums set in
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St. Giles and the second being Women
and Medicine in Houston and Fitzrovia.
Today we plan to uncover the challenges these women faced,
the innovative approaches they employed in both medical
treatments and hospital management, and the lasting
impact of their work on the roleof women in medicine and beyond.
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Hello, Sylvia. Hello and I'm delighted to be
here to talk to you about my passion, which is The Hidden and
Lost Hospital of Endorse St. Basically, this is a story of a
hospital that was set up in the First World War.
It was set up between 1915 and 1919 and Doctor Flora Murray and
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Doctor Louisa Garrett Anderson. Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful,
but it's because it's the two names of her mother and her
father. They set up Endel St.
Military Hospital and they were motivated to do so because of
their own backgrounds. So Louisa's mother Elizabeth
Elizabeth Garrett and then she married Anderson.
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She Elizabeth, was the first qualified practicing woman
English woman doctor in who. She practiced in London in in
England, but practicing in London.
And she struggled to get, reallystruggled to get her
qualifications. But she then set up a training
school for women and both Flora and Louisa qualified through
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that training school, but they didn't know each other.
And then Louisa worked in her mother's hospital as her mother
retired. So that was around about 1900.
And she also became very interested in the suffrage
movement. So both Flora and Louisa, up of
their time would have inevitablyknown about the suffrage
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movement. And of course Louisa's aunt was
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who had set up the first suffrage
movement for women. The suffragettes were more
militant. Flora Murray became the
physician to Emmeline Pankhurst,and both Flora and Louisa were
involved in both withholding money for tax and throwing
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bricks through the windows of the buildings on the mall.
And so they were arrested and and spent time in Holloway
prison for four weeks. So by 1914 they'd met and they'd
become partners, and they were living together and they
established a hospital together,a hospital for women and
children. And along comes the First World
War still struggling for suffrage of course and and I
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think it was their by this time they're in their 40s, their 40
year olds and I think it was their strong sense of duty that
that you know they they were trained doctors here was a war
soldiers were being killed. They wanted to volunteer their
time and their their skills and and they did actually set up the
woman's hospital call WHC, whichinvited other women who were
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already qualified to become volunteers as part of that.
And it was a sort of alternativeto the the rack, the Royal
Auxiliary Military call that wasin existence for men.
But but anyway they they knew that their sisters in Scotland
had gone to the British militaryoffice and offered their
services and being told to go and sit at home basically.
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And they so therefore, they decided to offer their services
directly to the Belgians, and they went over to Paris on the
boat train, they were waved off by Louise, Louise's mother.
Elizabeth had a number of friends and family, and they got
there in both excitement and trepidation.
But they were welcomed with openarms for the skills that they
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were offering, and they were shown to Clarity's hotel and
offered that as a hospital. Louisa was quite shocked when
she went down down to the front and saw the state of the
soldiers coming in. Because these women had never
been allowed to operate on men. They were only allowed to
operate on women and children. But they set two and created a
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hospital out of Clarity's hotel amongst all the chandeliers and
the marble. They had operating tables and
they sterilized their equipment in the fish kettles.
They contacted their family and did the equivalent of
crowdfunding, got money together, got friends out as
nurses and and some female doctors as well.
And they got an ambulance, sent out equipment that sent out and
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and started and they were basically doing complex cranial
operations, complex stomach operations on men, which they've
never done before. They were dealing with gangrene
from Trent and trench foot and all sorts of infections, And
that background that they'd had from their early training, which
was about sterilizing equipment and taking an antiseptic kind of
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approach to medicine, stood themin good stead.
And it became clear to the English military that this
hospital was a success, that more soldiers were surviving in
that hospital than than in otherhospitals.
A bit like the Florence Nightingale story in the Crimean
War. And so their attention was
particularly drawn to General Kioff who was the director
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General in the military at the time for Britain.
And he invited them to come backto London and establish a
hospital to to bring the soldiers that were coming on the
boats, the boat train into Waterloo, bring them into a
hospital and operate on them there.
And given that that was what they wanted to do in the 1st
place was operate on English patients as it were, you know
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contribute to their own country then then they of course said
yes. And Kia found this building
which was an old workhouse building.
It had been relatively recently rebuilt in the 1870s and then
closed around about nineteen 6/19/06.
So it was a vacant and he went round it and thought right, this
will do, this will do the job and when one of the military,
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the Royal Auxiliary Military Corps people, the the Iraq
people that this was going to beconverted into a hospital run by
women, he said God forbid women the their reaction was pretty
powerful. My goodness.
So they had to do a lot to provethemselves before the British
men would give them any. Time.
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And they decided that that's what they would do.
They would really prove themselves what they felt.
And what they knew was that theyhad developed a certain amount
of not just expertise, but toughness and resilience, as we
would call it today, by running that hospital in and free.
It was about for 15 months. They ran the hospital both in
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Paris in that Clarity's hotel, but also for three or four
months in Wimmero and nearer thefront and.
And so they'd seen a lot of the sorts of problems that they
would encounter. But the numbers were phenomenal,
really. You know that they, they had a
500 bed hospital that they established in that in that
workhouse. It was extended to 570 beds in
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the end and up to 80 soldiers ata time were received and taken
up to the theatre and they were performing up to 20 operations a
day. So it was relentless.
It was really, really relentless.
And they were employing and training and taking on other
women doctors and women nurses. It was, they decided from the
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out it was going to be a hospital run by women for
soldiers. So although there were some men
there, they were these who kind of forced upon them by key
officers, You know, we're going to have to employ some of these
as porters or security. It was fundamentally their
hospital and they were very clear that they were the
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commanding officers in that hospital.
And Louisa's kind of speciality was surgery.
So she was the lead surgeon and she would induct the others into
the into the ways. Louisa had spent a year after
her initial training in America and she enrolled on a course
there and she was very influenced by a Doctor Who had
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what we would call a kind of bedgood bedside manner.
So he he his kind of mantra was that you needed to listen to the
patients. So he would both brief his
colleagues as to what what operations, what, what problems
were coming in, what challenges they were going to face.
And then after the operation, hewould go down to the wards and
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talk to the patients about what he'd done and how they were
feeling, etcetera. So Louisa introduced that
approach into this hospital, into this military hospital
which was really avant-garde. It was very, it was unheard of
to to run a hospital for military soldiers.
That was both briefing the team on what we were going to do and
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how we were going to operate etcetera and then going and
visiting them on the wards. And I think that was because
they they realized very early onin their work in Paris that
shell shock was one of the majorkind of issues that they were
going to have to deal with and and was influencing the ability
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of those soldiers to recover. So the body was in shock, but
the mind was in shock as well. And so that kind of just just
from a clinical point of view going down and talking to them
and listening to them on the wards was an innovation that she
brought in. But but also there were, there
were other innovations and they those were to do with medicine.
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So she introduced a new paste. It was called the bismuth paste,
and it was called the BIIP. So it was the iodine, the bismus
and iodine and paraffin mixture.And it was a it was an it had
been invented by one of the other invented it being kind of
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concocted together, if you like.And it was thought that this
pace could act as a kind of antiseptic because there's no
antibiotics at that time. So septicemia was one of the
most likely ways in which you were going to die.
So what was really important wasnot just operating but then
recovery afterwards and recoveryin such a way that you didn't
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get septicemia. So.
So one of the problems with the previous approach was that you
had to change the bandages regularly and every time you
went to change the bandages thenthe scab would kind of pull off
and and then you had to re applythis paste stuff and re bandage
and that took up huge amounts ofthe nurses time.
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She introduced this other this new pace, this business paste
and and it in in a clinical trialling kind of manner.
So she tried it out with one group of soldiers and then the
other group of soldiers had the old way of doing things and she
got one of the doctors to take alead on that, the women doctors
to take a lead on that and and together they wrote it up and it
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got published in The Lancet. But perhaps more importantly
what what they realized quite quickly is that it worked and
they could leave the bandages onfor 21 days, any infection
setting in and that saved time. So with these, you know, 20
operations a day and all these soldiers coming through eighty
soldiers a day, then it was really important to be able to
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spend more time on on the other aspects of recovery.
And as well, they were doing allkinds of they were.
They were trying to improve their resuscitation methods to
counter the shock that the soldiers often encountered.
They had ortho. They were in close contact with
an Orthea orthopaedic surgeon and consultant who was
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developing different types of splints.
And cranial surgery was in its infancy when the First World War
broke out. And a number of male consultants
came down to watch Louisa do hercranial surgery.
And what they realized was that actually she was quite slight.
She was quite a smallish woman and and and very lean and she
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had small fingers and she could get the the, the kind of she'd
get in there to sort out the cranial surgery in a way that
they recognized they perhaps couldn't with their with their
larger fingers. So all those sort of things that
had happened during the 1800s where women were finally allowed
in to operate the Telegraph, forexample, they were allowed into
the post office and they were invited in to work in the
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Telegraph office because they'reputting in of the plugs.
They, the men who in charge, thought was very similar to
women sewing their embroidery. So they thought, oh, women will
be quite good at this, you know,because they've got small nibble
fingers and telegraphy was, you know, very much along those
lines was Similarly, they began to realize, well, perhaps
there's some benefits having women doing these sorts of
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operations because actually theycan do these bits a bit better
than we can. But all the time they were
trying to make sure that it wasn't just seen as a kind of
novelty hospital. They were trying to make sure
that they were recognized for what they were doing.
We're a hospital. They, they had the deeds, not
word slogan of the suffragettes emblazoned over the proscenium
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arch in the entrance to the hospital.
So there were, you know, it's definitely about suffrage and we
are, you know, we're fighting for the boat as well, but but it
was also we are doing a professional job here.
We are doctors doing a job and we happen to be women and you
know and by the way women can dothis.
So so all of this kind of work that they were doing was ground
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breaking. And an example of this this must
pace was that she, she did some talks to demonstrate you know
what what they were doing and how successful it was and she
talked about being able to deal with an Abscess on the frontal
brake lobe of the brain of a man.
So this was this Abscess was managed with this paste, and
then another who had both his legs fractured, and there was
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pus pouring from them. And both of them, you know,
lived and and lived to tell the tale if you like, you know, as a
result of of using this pace andindeed the pace carried on being
used. It was, it was taken on in both
military medicine and ordinary medicine right through to the
Second World War, which was because of that.
That was about the period when antibiotics began to come in.
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And even today it's used in in nose and throat operations.
So it was ground breaking the work that they were doing, and
it was so important that they found the time in between all of
these exhausting operations to write it up and put it into The
Lancet so that it was recognizedas a genuine piece of research.
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It's a huge achievement, isn't it?
It's breaking through the barriers in the 1st place,
proving themselves. But then it's not just
firefighting, it's looking at ways of improving through
management, invention, refining techniques, and then publishing
it all as well. I mean, this is this is mammoth.
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Stuff. It is.
It is. And I mean what they did for the
soldiers in terms of their mental health was it was equally
incredible. So this focus on treating shell
shock, I mean there was a specialist place that that some
of the soldiers could go to to to kind of have shell shock
dealt with. It was would be a more kind of
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group therapy environment. But, but they were pioneering in
terms of the work that they weredoing for the for the actual
mental health. They they did things like they
had all the walls and the walls were light and were bright with
windows painted in green. They had coloured quilts.
They had homemade quilts on eachof the beds.
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So each quilt was different and they had screens between the
beds that were painted differentcolours.
They had standard lamps for the patients to read.
And they were provided by Saint Leonard's school which was the
school that Louisa had gone to. So, you know, she was constantly
doing this fundraising stuff or or her mother and her
grandmother were things. Don't think her grandmother was
alive by then, but her grandmother had been good at
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that and her mother was certainly good at that kind of
fundraising stuff. And the wards were all decorated
with fresh flowers and they werereplaced by volunteers and that
was led by her sister-in-law. So her brother Alan's wife, the
courtyards were bright, were hadbright flowers in tubs and
window boxes and and they used all sorts of bits of
entertainment. So they would get their fellow
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friends who were actors or actresses to come and perform on
stage. And then they ran these sports
days so that they would have competitions of crawling across
the floor and the first person to get there got a cigarette.
And I mean, these days, obviously you wouldn't reward
with cigarettes, but during bothWorld Wars, that was the kind of
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crutch really to get you throughfrom day-to-day.
They had the Breath Best DressedWard award.
So, you know, the soldiers that dressed up their ward best got
an award at Christmas. And they were really intent on
supplying the library with books.
So they were encouraging the soldiers to read, to read novels
to be read to. They had a whole kind of, again,
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almost an army of women that would come and read to the
soldiers, including Winston Churchill's daughter.
And it was all this kind of focus on creating a homely and
sympathetic environment because they knew that that would help
the soldiers to to feel more connected.
There's a lot of the soldiers talked about the fact that they
they couldn't really connect with the society, with London,
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you know, as they found it, having gone through those
incredible awful experiences in the trenches and seeing what
they've seen and seeing their their fellow soldiers being
blown up and bits of body parts everywhere, so to try and soothe
the mind. And a lot of these soldiers will
be waking up screaming in the night, etcetera.
Then they introduced all of these kinds of activities and
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they were very strong on occupational therapy.
So they they had the soldiers doing bits of embroidery and and
sewing and all the rest of it. And they stayed in touch.
A lot of these soldiers wrote back to them years later and
said, you know, can you send me some more socks like the ones
that you've we knitted when we were in the hospital or
whatever, you know, it was incredible.
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Yeah, yeah. It was very much relationship
based. They do say that at times of war
is the catalyst for new inventions.
But this is something you can imagine the the the
conversations around when doctors met talking about these
women, doctors, you know, painting the walls and fresh
flowers. What, what, what are they doing?
By Jove, you know, But actually,especially during Time War, when
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these men, it's probably the first time they've even been
away. From home, yes.
You know, you want to find that sense of of of reconnecting with
something, the the reason to whyyou were fighting.
And of course, a lot of these men are going to be going back
exactly as. Well, yeah, I mean that.
That I think must have been really distressing, actually,
for those women doctors knowing that they were getting them
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better from being deeply poorly only to be sent out again.
Yeah. And.
Was there any synergy you mentioned about the messaging
over the front door, deeds not words?
How did they use the hospital toshow what women could achieve?
Well, they were the the inside, the hospital itself.
As I said that the the sort of mantra was you've got to be
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better than the men, we've got to do better here as the group
of women and we are pioneering the way, you know, it was very
clear from the outset that we will be judged severely if we
don't succeed. So we've got to be better than
the rest. But they also gave both Louisa
and Flora gave weekly lectures to young staff, educated them
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about women's rights and their duties as citizens and and the
patients themselves were constantly exposed to feminist
ideas. So when these women, their
friends came and read to them, they weren't reading any odd
stuff. They were reading some quite
kind of tracts about why women should have the vote.
And you know what? What women can do, really.
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And I think the other thing is, the other thing to remember is
that there were women on the streets doing jobs that men had
done in all sorts of ways. So there were obviously they
will be working in the munition factories and you were seeing
them going on the trams, but thetrams were being driven by
women. The post was being delivered by
women, the post was being sortedby women.
And there are, there are photographs in the post office
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museum, amazing photographs of these women driving the Royal
Mail carriage. So they had the horses, eight
horses, and they had boots, black shiny boots up to their
knees, breeches, and then these amazing kind of blazer coat
things and there and top hats. And there they were in the
countryside driving these Royal Mail coaches through the
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villages. Whereas before women weren't
even allowed to deliver the post.
You know, you would perhaps see a woman trailing in Scotland
because her husband was poorly. And she was sort of doing the
round for him and you may see a woman behind the counter
occasionally, but fundamentally women were doing that telegraphy
that I said and but that was about it.
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So to suddenly see women doing, working in shops, you know, but
doing butchering, actually serving the the customers and
doing all of this work. This was the hospital being run
by women was going alongside of that.
So the for that period, for fouryears, for from 1914 through to
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five years really through to 1919, women were seen on the
streets in a way that they hadn't been seen before.
The tragedy is that it all closed down afterwards and and
to my mind they had to do it allover again.
In the Second World War, it was as if everyone had forgotten
that women can do these things. So yes, there was synergy and
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they, they certainly were very mindful of the battle that was
still on to get suffrage. And and of course they weren't.
1919 was the suffrage Act, whichI mean, it wasn't full.
It gave gave the vote to women who had property and who were
over 35 years old. And it, you know, took another
five or six years for women, allwomen, to be able to get the
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vote. But it overturned that kind of
attitude that was there up to the First World War, which was
it was not just about, I mean there was a lot of this in the
beginning or well, you know, women have basically women have
their monthlies and and they become all emotional.
So you can't really trust their judgment.
So, so Millicent Garrett Fawcett, when she was running
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the winning suffrage movement, just believed that if they put
forward the logical arguments ina logical way and kept putting
petitions forward, then in the end these rational men would see
sense. And of course they didn't.
But probably the bigger reason that they didn't get the vote
before the First World War is because both parties were
anxious that if women got the vote, they would vote for the
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other party. So it wasn't in their interest
to kind of enable more people tovote for the opposition.
Whereas the kind of I think whatwhat kind of held it held the
day after the war was the thought of almost rioting on the
streets if they said that women couldn't have the vote and they
were going to treat them in the way that they had before the war
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of arresting them and putting them in prison after everything
that they had given in the FirstWorld War.
So. So yes, there was strong synergy
and I do think that they expected, I don't think they
maybe they didn't even think about it.
I think they assumed that this is Flora and Louisa.
I think this is my own view. I think they assumed that once
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the war was finished, they wouldbe able to be employed in any
hospital regardless of whether it was for men or not.
They would be taken on as surgeons in in ordinary
hospitals. They wouldn't have to work in
hospitals for women and childrenand of course that didn't.
Happen. No, I think it's a very
different world being war to then peacetime, where you can
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choose what what, what rules youwant to to live by, but in more
time anything goes just to beat the other side.
There was something resonated with me, what you were saying
about recognition. Really as a woman, you've got to
get all of these points across. It reminds me of that song of
anything you can do, I can do better.
And working in tech that I had, I've been often get said
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whatever you do, you have to do it far better than your male
counterparts just to get acknowledgement of the basics
being delivered. So.
But there was. A royal recognition?
That the the hospital received, do you want to share a little
bit about that so? Basically, George the Fifth and
his wife Mary came to visit. So Queen Mary was an interesting
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person in herself. She she was the one that
encouraged the women to send presents, send boxes to their
soldiers, to their sons, their husbands, their brothers,
whatever, as part of the war effort.
And she also encouraged them to knit socks.
And in fact, it was Mary McCarthy, who was a fantastic
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trade unionist when got an audience with her via her
daughter, really Princess Alexandra and said, actually
you're by encouraging women to knit socks and send them out to
the front, you're undermining the jobs that many of my women,
basically working class women do, which is doing piece work at
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home, knitting, and you're depriving them of a livelihood.
So they're the ones now that theprime breadwinners, because
they're men folk, are out on thefront.
I think we need to rethink this scheme.
So. So they did.
And Queen Mary then encouraged them to send out cigarettes and
chocolate instead, which, you know, again today with our
(28:55):
medical knowledge and information, we know wasn't an
ideal thing. But it was interesting that
Queen Mary, you know, wanted to do her bit and to encourage
women to do their bit. But it was very much about
encouraging them to do it from the home.
So once they came once, George the Fifth and Queen Mary Kane
and they had actually laid the foundation stone for Louisa's
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mother, Elizabeth's third and final hospital, which is the one
that you can still see. It's it's part of the unison
building on the Houston Rd. So they knew the family, they
knew the Garrett family and it was Agnes Garrett and Rhonda,
their cousin, who decorated the inside of that hospital.
And they were very impressed with the interior design.
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So. So when Louisa and Flora had
opened their hospital, they werekind of very keen to come.
And they came in 1915 and they had, I mean Louisa and Flora had
had a lot of journalists coming when they were in France, both
French journalists and English journalists, British Red Cross
and other Red Cross and so on, to see this hospital run by
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women. But the one in London was really
kind of Ground Zero journalists interest and and when the king
and queen visited it was even more so.
So that whole thing of this is fantastic.
The work that these women are doing, these soldiers are doing,
these, these women doctors are doing on the soldiers is is just
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fantastic was the kind of message that went out and the
royal recognition was was important.
But for them personally it was much more important when
Emmeline Pankhurst came because you know she was the queen of
the suffrage movement and she did come and she also said you
know, well done girls. Sadly, by by the time even even
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when the train left for with Louisa and Flora to go to Paris,
by that time her mother Elizabeth had developed vascular
dementia. So she probably did visit, but
she wouldn't really have been able to you know, relate
particularly to what they were doing.
And that was quite sad, I think,for Louisa.
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And and indeed Elizabeth would have known what was coming
because as a doctor, as a medical doctor, once she had the
diagnosis of vascular dementia, she would have known and in some
ways it was really good that shedied in 2019.
So she didn't have it that long.It's four years because for such
an amazing mind to to lose all of those faculties would have
(31:25):
been horrendous. So.
So I think for for Louisa the next best thing was to have
Emmeline Pankhurst visit and andkind of give that
acknowledgement of of what they were doing.
And and I think as well just having all those other, I mean
all the newspapers, the Times they they created their own
little newspaper called The Gazette and that was another
(31:48):
occupation that they got the soldiers to be involved in.
But the Times in the mail and all those newspapers were
reporting on how successful theythey were doing.
So they did get that kind of recognition when it was they
were were running the hospital but it was afterwards that they
they you know they really didn'tget the recognition.
They really didn't get the support, the continuing support
(32:10):
that they wanted and that they expected.
We were talking before about theefficiency of the the female
staff and the success there, butof course that then is reflected
in the number of patients treated as well.
Phenomenal number what? 26,000, yes, it was. 1915 to
(32:32):
1919 that that's. Yeah, that's right.
And they had outpatients and they were in in charge of at
least four other kind of substations if you like.
Yeah. I mean, there were thousands,
literally thousands of patients treated and and they didn't,
those patients did not forget them and they didn't forget
their experience. They knew that this experience
was different to the experiencesthat because The thing is that
(32:56):
there were 6 postal deliveries aday and those parcels were
getting to the front within a day.
And 1/2, you know, the postal system was amazing and all that
work that the women that were running the postal system did
during the First World War, theydidn't just maintain it, they
(33:17):
expanded the postal system. So the soldiers were writing to
all of their friends, all of their family, everybody not just
from the front, but when they got back into the hospital in in
London. So people would have known about
it. You know, it wasn't just word of
mouth. It was through letters and in
the press. And they they understood that
(33:37):
this was something special that they they were receiving.
I mean there were a large numberof other kind of makeshift
hospitals that were set up. If you see Downton Abbey, you
know that they set up a hospitalin Downton Abbey in the First
World War. Well, those state sorts of
stately homes were being taken over by the lady of the house
(33:58):
and run as hospitals all across the country.
So. So that that idea of women being
involved, involved in hospitals was kind of established, women's
homes being given over to createthat homely feeling was there.
But to actually be operated on by female doctors was unique.
One of the questions then is after all of well, say, the the
(34:21):
stress and the excitement and the pioneering efforts during
the First World War peace is announced, we can now move on to
this new future. Men and women together Hurrah.
Oh, no, indeed. So they get their CB ES,
(34:41):
Commanders of the British Empire.
Actually, I think I can't. Yeah, I think it is CB ES.
It's either OB or CBE. They're recognised, you know,
they're Danes for for the work that they did.
They don't finish, they don't close the hospital until 2019.
So it's a year after the war hasended.
They're kind of allowed to finish off as it were.
But yeah, it does close. You know, the doors shut, a lot
(35:02):
of the equipment was left there and they go back to, they kind
of look at each other and think,well, what we going to do then.
So they go back to their hospital on the Harrow Rd. and
the Hospital for Women and Children and kind of pick up the
pieces and begin to start again.And Louisa did apply to four or
five hospitals to see whether she would be accepted.
(35:25):
And they said no, it's like nothing's changed.
No, no, no. You can only work with women and
children. And and Flora gets sick.
So Flora got cancer. She died in 1923.
So basically they work in the hospital between 1921 and
19/19/19, 2020-2021. And then they moved to
(35:45):
Buckinghamshire in 22. And she died in 1923.
She was 55 at the time. She was really young.
And Louisa, I think he's heartbroken but also devastated
that really they haven't achieved anything in terms of
breaking into the men's world ofmedicine, despite everything,
(36:08):
despite those, those innovations, despite 26,000
patients, men, all that. Proof.
Yeah, exactly. And approval and support.
So she doesn't continue practising in medicine.
She goes back to the family homeand she, she goes back to
Aldburgh and she's she she becomes mayor there.
(36:29):
Her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, had been the first
female mayor. I mean, she's along with so many
other things. And Louisa kind of steps into
her mother's shoes. Her mother's now died.
She becomes mayor. She does kind of bits of good
work. She helps set up other hospitals
and so on, you know, as in fundraising, but she doesn't
work in them until the Second World War.
(36:50):
And then in the Second World War, she does help out at her
mother's old hospital, the hospital warning down on the
Houston Rd. But she died in 1943.
She died in Brighton. So there's a there's a plaque,
the burial of Flora. Murray is in Penn, in the
churchyard in Penn, and there's a plaque there that's a tribute
to Flora from Louisa. And Louisa's ashes are in
(37:13):
Brighton. But you know, I think her spirit
is there in Penn, in Buckinghamshire, and really the
legacy, you know, people have touncover the legacy.
So, you know, if people wanted to know more, obviously come on
my walks, you know, the the Women in Medicine Walk or Tale
of Two Slums Walk and share it with me as we go round.
(37:35):
But, you know, the building's nolonger there because it's been
replaced with council housing. But there's more to read in the
wonderful book by Wendy Moore called Endel St.
And there's lots of kind of detail about individual nurses,
doctors and soldiers lives in inthat book.
But really, unless you know a bit about it, you're not aware.
(37:58):
I don't think I wasn't aware until I came across the plaque
and thought, what's this? And you know, it's and that is
sad. I think, you know, there should
be like a Netflix film about this.
Well, I'll just forward this podcast.
I can go to the producers, see what they can do.
(38:20):
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's it's a sad and also a happy
story about what what they were able to achieve for themselves.
They they understood their limits and they pushed those.
And yeah, I mean yeah, feeling that everything you've achieved
and proven and not being able toget through that final curtain
(38:41):
must have been really quite heartbreaking.
Especially when you're losing your your partner as well just
lost the will to to fight really.
But the fight continues now in order to to share these stories,
your Tale of Two Slums walking tour, which is around St.
Giles. I've now done twice, loved both
(39:01):
times, learnt a lot and it does show you how things are changing
on a gradual basis. Your Women in Medicine in
Houston and Fitzrovia walking tours have us a little bit more
about that. Okay.
I start with Elizabeth Garrett Andersons Hospital and do some
back story about her and then wego down to look at the statue of
(39:25):
Louisa Aldrich Brandis, who I'vealso written a little blog on
and there's a statue of her there.
She was the Dean of the London Women's Medical Training School
after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, to go past the
Cruciform which is now the Wolfson PhD Centre, which is the
hospital that was ECL Hospital. And that's where Agatha Christie
(39:47):
did her Second World War experience as an apothecrist,
having trained at the same apothecary route way that
Elizabeth Guerra Anderson had. And then we wander over to
Fitzrovia, where I tell the taleof James Barry, who was.
A woman who became a man and wasa practicing Dr. for 40 years,
would you believe? And then no one ever realized.
(40:09):
And then we work our way back down past some amazing new
buildings to the Cleveland workhouse and we end at the
wonderful Fitzrovia Chapel, which wonderfully is still
there, which is the Chapel of the hospital.
So. So UCLH is the combination of
University College London Hospital and Middlesex Hospital,
that big green and white building that you can see when
(40:31):
you come out Houston Station. And and one of the the facts
that I like to share with my groups is that I counted up how
many women consultants there were in 2023 and it was
basically 1/3, a third of the total number of consultants were
women. So it still isn't 50% and I feel
(40:53):
that Louisa and Elizabeth would both be a little bit sad that
we're we're not there yet. On the other hand, it's only
just over 100 years since we hadthe vote and it was only in, I
think it was 1976 sort of time that rape in marriage was
declared a thing. And so, you know, violence
(41:17):
against women is a relatively new thing.
We're only allowed to be awardedtheir degrees at Cambridge in
1946, which was after we had colour television.
So, you know, it's relatively recent that we've had a lot of
these developments and it's relatively recent that Louisa
and Flora were pioneering their work as female doctors operating
(41:41):
on soldiers. Yeah.
Well, Sylvia, thank you very much for that.
For those who are interested in learning a little bit more, I'll
put the links to both the the book and also Sylvia's blog post
and also links to both of her walks, A Tale of Two Slums in
Saint Charles and also Women in Medicine in Houston and
(42:03):
Fitzrovia. That's all for now.
Until next time.
Welcome, dear listeners, to another fascinating episode of
the London History Podcast, where we dive into the vibrant
and diverse past of this great city.
I am your host, Hazel Baker, a qualified London tour guide and
founder of London guidedwalks.co.uk.
Whether you're a born and bred Londoner or a curious listener,
(00:23):
join us on a journey through time as we explore the city
together. Each episode is supported by
show notes, transcripts, photos and further reading, all to be
found on our website. If you enjoy what we do then
you'll love our guided walks andprivate tours that we offer
throughout the year. All bookable online at
(00:44):
londonguidedwalks.co.uk Subscribe now to never miss an
episode and if you enjoy the show, please leave us a review
and rating to help spread the word to other history lovers.
This week's exploration is one of London's most extraordinary
chapters from the First World War.
(01:07):
The story of Endle St. Military Hospital, a ground
breaking institution that was not only at the forefront of
medical innovation, but also shines a light on the
indomitable spirit and resilience of women.
Founded in 1915 amongst the chaos of a world at war, Endor
(01:30):
St. in Covent Garden stood out for being entirely run by women
from its surgeons to its orderlies.
This was at a time when the medical profession was almost
exclusively male dominated, making the hospital a radical
experiment in both medicine and gender equality.
(01:53):
Pendle St. Military Hospital was led by two
remarkable women, Doctor Flora Murray and Doctor Louisa Garrett
Anderson, who were life partnersas well as Co founders of the
hospital. Both were suffragettes fiercely
advocating for women's rights, and they brought their
(02:13):
determination and pioneering spirit to the challenge of
running a military hospital. Under their leadership, Kendall
St. treated over 26,000 patients, earning A reputation
for excellence in care and efficiency, challenging the
prejudice of the time and proving conclusively that women
(02:35):
could excel in what was considered a man's world.
Joining me in the studio to delve into this fascinating but
also slightly frustrating story is Borough of Camden tour guide
Sylvia McNamara, who offers two related walking tours with us at
London Guided Walks, the first being A Tale of Two Slums set in
(02:58):
St. Giles and the second being Women
and Medicine in Houston and Fitzrovia.
Today we plan to uncover the challenges these women faced,
the innovative approaches they employed in both medical
treatments and hospital management, and the lasting
impact of their work on the roleof women in medicine and beyond.
(03:21):
Hello, Sylvia. Hello and I'm delighted to be
here to talk to you about my passion, which is The Hidden and
Lost Hospital of Endorse St. Basically, this is a story of a
hospital that was set up in the First World War.
It was set up between 1915 and 1919 and Doctor Flora Murray and
(03:41):
Doctor Louisa Garrett Anderson. Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful,
but it's because it's the two names of her mother and her
father. They set up Endel St.
Military Hospital and they were motivated to do so because of
their own backgrounds. So Louisa's mother Elizabeth
Elizabeth Garrett and then she married Anderson.
(04:03):
She Elizabeth, was the first qualified practicing woman
English woman doctor in who. She practiced in London in in
England, but practicing in London.
And she struggled to get, reallystruggled to get her
qualifications. But she then set up a training
school for women and both Flora and Louisa qualified through
(04:23):
that training school, but they didn't know each other.
And then Louisa worked in her mother's hospital as her mother
retired. So that was around about 1900.
And she also became very interested in the suffrage
movement. So both Flora and Louisa, up of
their time would have inevitablyknown about the suffrage
(04:44):
movement. And of course Louisa's aunt was
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who had set up the first suffrage
movement for women. The suffragettes were more
militant. Flora Murray became the
physician to Emmeline Pankhurst,and both Flora and Louisa were
involved in both withholding money for tax and throwing
(05:05):
bricks through the windows of the buildings on the mall.
And so they were arrested and and spent time in Holloway
prison for four weeks. So by 1914 they'd met and they'd
become partners, and they were living together and they
established a hospital together,a hospital for women and
children. And along comes the First World
War still struggling for suffrage of course and and I
(05:28):
think it was their by this time they're in their 40s, their 40
year olds and I think it was their strong sense of duty that
that you know they they were trained doctors here was a war
soldiers were being killed. They wanted to volunteer their
time and their their skills and and they did actually set up the
woman's hospital call WHC, whichinvited other women who were
(05:51):
already qualified to become volunteers as part of that.
And it was a sort of alternativeto the the rack, the Royal
Auxiliary Military call that wasin existence for men.
But but anyway they they knew that their sisters in Scotland
had gone to the British militaryoffice and offered their
services and being told to go and sit at home basically.
(06:15):
And they so therefore, they decided to offer their services
directly to the Belgians, and they went over to Paris on the
boat train, they were waved off by Louise, Louise's mother.
Elizabeth had a number of friends and family, and they got
there in both excitement and trepidation.
But they were welcomed with openarms for the skills that they
(06:35):
were offering, and they were shown to Clarity's hotel and
offered that as a hospital. Louisa was quite shocked when
she went down down to the front and saw the state of the
soldiers coming in. Because these women had never
been allowed to operate on men. They were only allowed to
operate on women and children. But they set two and created a
(06:56):
hospital out of Clarity's hotel amongst all the chandeliers and
the marble. They had operating tables and
they sterilized their equipment in the fish kettles.
They contacted their family and did the equivalent of
crowdfunding, got money together, got friends out as
nurses and and some female doctors as well.
And they got an ambulance, sent out equipment that sent out and
(07:20):
and started and they were basically doing complex cranial
operations, complex stomach operations on men, which they've
never done before. They were dealing with gangrene
from Trent and trench foot and all sorts of infections, And
that background that they'd had from their early training, which
was about sterilizing equipment and taking an antiseptic kind of
(07:44):
approach to medicine, stood themin good stead.
And it became clear to the English military that this
hospital was a success, that more soldiers were surviving in
that hospital than than in otherhospitals.
A bit like the Florence Nightingale story in the Crimean
War. And so their attention was
particularly drawn to General Kioff who was the director
(08:05):
General in the military at the time for Britain.
And he invited them to come backto London and establish a
hospital to to bring the soldiers that were coming on the
boats, the boat train into Waterloo, bring them into a
hospital and operate on them there.
And given that that was what they wanted to do in the 1st
place was operate on English patients as it were, you know
(08:28):
contribute to their own country then then they of course said
yes. And Kia found this building
which was an old workhouse building.
It had been relatively recently rebuilt in the 1870s and then
closed around about nineteen 6/19/06.
So it was a vacant and he went round it and thought right, this
will do, this will do the job and when one of the military,
(08:51):
the Royal Auxiliary Military Corps people, the the Iraq
people that this was going to beconverted into a hospital run by
women, he said God forbid women the their reaction was pretty
powerful. My goodness.
So they had to do a lot to provethemselves before the British
men would give them any. Time.
(09:14):
And they decided that that's what they would do.
They would really prove themselves what they felt.
And what they knew was that theyhad developed a certain amount
of not just expertise, but toughness and resilience, as we
would call it today, by running that hospital in and free.
It was about for 15 months. They ran the hospital both in
(09:34):
Paris in that Clarity's hotel, but also for three or four
months in Wimmero and nearer thefront and.
And so they'd seen a lot of the sorts of problems that they
would encounter. But the numbers were phenomenal,
really. You know that they, they had a
500 bed hospital that they established in that in that
workhouse. It was extended to 570 beds in
(09:57):
the end and up to 80 soldiers ata time were received and taken
up to the theatre and they were performing up to 20 operations a
day. So it was relentless.
It was really, really relentless.
And they were employing and training and taking on other
women doctors and women nurses. It was, they decided from the
(10:18):
out it was going to be a hospital run by women for
soldiers. So although there were some men
there, they were these who kind of forced upon them by key
officers, You know, we're going to have to employ some of these
as porters or security. It was fundamentally their
hospital and they were very clear that they were the
(10:38):
commanding officers in that hospital.
And Louisa's kind of speciality was surgery.
So she was the lead surgeon and she would induct the others into
the into the ways. Louisa had spent a year after
her initial training in America and she enrolled on a course
there and she was very influenced by a Doctor Who had
(11:01):
what we would call a kind of bedgood bedside manner.
So he he his kind of mantra was that you needed to listen to the
patients. So he would both brief his
colleagues as to what what operations, what, what problems
were coming in, what challenges they were going to face.
And then after the operation, hewould go down to the wards and
(11:23):
talk to the patients about what he'd done and how they were
feeling, etcetera. So Louisa introduced that
approach into this hospital, into this military hospital
which was really avant-garde. It was very, it was unheard of
to to run a hospital for military soldiers.
That was both briefing the team on what we were going to do and
(11:45):
how we were going to operate etcetera and then going and
visiting them on the wards. And I think that was because
they they realized very early onin their work in Paris that
shell shock was one of the majorkind of issues that they were
going to have to deal with and and was influencing the ability
(12:05):
of those soldiers to recover. So the body was in shock, but
the mind was in shock as well. And so that kind of just just
from a clinical point of view going down and talking to them
and listening to them on the wards was an innovation that she
brought in. But but also there were, there
were other innovations and they those were to do with medicine.
(12:28):
So she introduced a new paste. It was called the bismuth paste,
and it was called the BIIP. So it was the iodine, the bismus
and iodine and paraffin mixture.And it was a it was an it had
been invented by one of the other invented it being kind of
(12:49):
concocted together, if you like.And it was thought that this
pace could act as a kind of antiseptic because there's no
antibiotics at that time. So septicemia was one of the
most likely ways in which you were going to die.
So what was really important wasnot just operating but then
recovery afterwards and recoveryin such a way that you didn't
(13:09):
get septicemia. So.
So one of the problems with the previous approach was that you
had to change the bandages regularly and every time you
went to change the bandages thenthe scab would kind of pull off
and and then you had to re applythis paste stuff and re bandage
and that took up huge amounts ofthe nurses time.
(13:30):
She introduced this other this new pace, this business paste
and and it in in a clinical trialling kind of manner.
So she tried it out with one group of soldiers and then the
other group of soldiers had the old way of doing things and she
got one of the doctors to take alead on that, the women doctors
to take a lead on that and and together they wrote it up and it
(13:50):
got published in The Lancet. But perhaps more importantly
what what they realized quite quickly is that it worked and
they could leave the bandages onfor 21 days, any infection
setting in and that saved time. So with these, you know, 20
operations a day and all these soldiers coming through eighty
soldiers a day, then it was really important to be able to
(14:11):
spend more time on on the other aspects of recovery.
And as well, they were doing allkinds of they were.
They were trying to improve their resuscitation methods to
counter the shock that the soldiers often encountered.
They had ortho. They were in close contact with
an Orthea orthopaedic surgeon and consultant who was
(14:34):
developing different types of splints.
And cranial surgery was in its infancy when the First World War
broke out. And a number of male consultants
came down to watch Louisa do hercranial surgery.
And what they realized was that actually she was quite slight.
She was quite a smallish woman and and and very lean and she
(14:57):
had small fingers and she could get the the, the kind of she'd
get in there to sort out the cranial surgery in a way that
they recognized they perhaps couldn't with their with their
larger fingers. So all those sort of things that
had happened during the 1800s where women were finally allowed
in to operate the Telegraph, forexample, they were allowed into
the post office and they were invited in to work in the
(15:19):
Telegraph office because they'reputting in of the plugs.
They, the men who in charge, thought was very similar to
women sewing their embroidery. So they thought, oh, women will
be quite good at this, you know,because they've got small nibble
fingers and telegraphy was, you know, very much along those
lines was Similarly, they began to realize, well, perhaps
there's some benefits having women doing these sorts of
(15:39):
operations because actually theycan do these bits a bit better
than we can. But all the time they were
trying to make sure that it wasn't just seen as a kind of
novelty hospital. They were trying to make sure
that they were recognized for what they were doing.
We're a hospital. They, they had the deeds, not
word slogan of the suffragettes emblazoned over the proscenium
(16:00):
arch in the entrance to the hospital.
So there were, you know, it's definitely about suffrage and we
are, you know, we're fighting for the boat as well, but but it
was also we are doing a professional job here.
We are doctors doing a job and we happen to be women and you
know and by the way women can dothis.
So so all of this kind of work that they were doing was ground
(16:24):
breaking. And an example of this this must
pace was that she, she did some talks to demonstrate you know
what what they were doing and how successful it was and she
talked about being able to deal with an Abscess on the frontal
brake lobe of the brain of a man.
So this was this Abscess was managed with this paste, and
then another who had both his legs fractured, and there was
(16:48):
pus pouring from them. And both of them, you know,
lived and and lived to tell the tale if you like, you know, as a
result of of using this pace andindeed the pace carried on being
used. It was, it was taken on in both
military medicine and ordinary medicine right through to the
Second World War, which was because of that.
That was about the period when antibiotics began to come in.
(17:11):
And even today it's used in in nose and throat operations.
So it was ground breaking the work that they were doing, and
it was so important that they found the time in between all of
these exhausting operations to write it up and put it into The
Lancet so that it was recognizedas a genuine piece of research.
(17:33):
It's a huge achievement, isn't it?
It's breaking through the barriers in the 1st place,
proving themselves. But then it's not just
firefighting, it's looking at ways of improving through
management, invention, refining techniques, and then publishing
it all as well. I mean, this is this is mammoth.
(17:53):
Stuff. It is.
It is. And I mean what they did for the
soldiers in terms of their mental health was it was equally
incredible. So this focus on treating shell
shock, I mean there was a specialist place that that some
of the soldiers could go to to to kind of have shell shock
dealt with. It was would be a more kind of
(18:13):
group therapy environment. But, but they were pioneering in
terms of the work that they weredoing for the for the actual
mental health. They they did things like they
had all the walls and the walls were light and were bright with
windows painted in green. They had coloured quilts.
They had homemade quilts on eachof the beds.
(18:35):
So each quilt was different and they had screens between the
beds that were painted differentcolours.
They had standard lamps for the patients to read.
And they were provided by Saint Leonard's school which was the
school that Louisa had gone to. So, you know, she was constantly
doing this fundraising stuff or or her mother and her
grandmother were things. Don't think her grandmother was
alive by then, but her grandmother had been good at
(18:56):
that and her mother was certainly good at that kind of
fundraising stuff. And the wards were all decorated
with fresh flowers and they werereplaced by volunteers and that
was led by her sister-in-law. So her brother Alan's wife, the
courtyards were bright, were hadbright flowers in tubs and
window boxes and and they used all sorts of bits of
entertainment. So they would get their fellow
(19:18):
friends who were actors or actresses to come and perform on
stage. And then they ran these sports
days so that they would have competitions of crawling across
the floor and the first person to get there got a cigarette.
And I mean, these days, obviously you wouldn't reward
with cigarettes, but during bothWorld Wars, that was the kind of
(19:39):
crutch really to get you throughfrom day-to-day.
They had the Breath Best DressedWard award.
So, you know, the soldiers that dressed up their ward best got
an award at Christmas. And they were really intent on
supplying the library with books.
So they were encouraging the soldiers to read, to read novels
to be read to. They had a whole kind of, again,
(20:02):
almost an army of women that would come and read to the
soldiers, including Winston Churchill's daughter.
And it was all this kind of focus on creating a homely and
sympathetic environment because they knew that that would help
the soldiers to to feel more connected.
There's a lot of the soldiers talked about the fact that they
they couldn't really connect with the society, with London,
(20:25):
you know, as they found it, having gone through those
incredible awful experiences in the trenches and seeing what
they've seen and seeing their their fellow soldiers being
blown up and bits of body parts everywhere, so to try and soothe
the mind. And a lot of these soldiers will
be waking up screaming in the night, etcetera.
Then they introduced all of these kinds of activities and
(20:46):
they were very strong on occupational therapy.
So they they had the soldiers doing bits of embroidery and and
sewing and all the rest of it. And they stayed in touch.
A lot of these soldiers wrote back to them years later and
said, you know, can you send me some more socks like the ones
that you've we knitted when we were in the hospital or
whatever, you know, it was incredible.
(21:08):
Yeah, yeah. It was very much relationship
based. They do say that at times of war
is the catalyst for new inventions.
But this is something you can imagine the the the
conversations around when doctors met talking about these
women, doctors, you know, painting the walls and fresh
flowers. What, what, what are they doing?
By Jove, you know, But actually,especially during Time War, when
(21:31):
these men, it's probably the first time they've even been
away. From home, yes.
You know, you want to find that sense of of of reconnecting with
something, the the reason to whyyou were fighting.
And of course, a lot of these men are going to be going back
exactly as. Well, yeah, I mean that.
That I think must have been really distressing, actually,
for those women doctors knowing that they were getting them
(21:53):
better from being deeply poorly only to be sent out again.
Yeah. And.
Was there any synergy you mentioned about the messaging
over the front door, deeds not words?
How did they use the hospital toshow what women could achieve?
Well, they were the the inside, the hospital itself.
As I said that the the sort of mantra was you've got to be
(22:15):
better than the men, we've got to do better here as the group
of women and we are pioneering the way, you know, it was very
clear from the outset that we will be judged severely if we
don't succeed. So we've got to be better than
the rest. But they also gave both Louisa
and Flora gave weekly lectures to young staff, educated them
(22:36):
about women's rights and their duties as citizens and and the
patients themselves were constantly exposed to feminist
ideas. So when these women, their
friends came and read to them, they weren't reading any odd
stuff. They were reading some quite
kind of tracts about why women should have the vote.
And you know what? What women can do, really.
(22:56):
And I think the other thing is, the other thing to remember is
that there were women on the streets doing jobs that men had
done in all sorts of ways. So there were obviously they
will be working in the munition factories and you were seeing
them going on the trams, but thetrams were being driven by
women. The post was being delivered by
women, the post was being sortedby women.
And there are, there are photographs in the post office
(23:18):
museum, amazing photographs of these women driving the Royal
Mail carriage. So they had the horses, eight
horses, and they had boots, black shiny boots up to their
knees, breeches, and then these amazing kind of blazer coat
things and there and top hats. And there they were in the
countryside driving these Royal Mail coaches through the
(23:40):
villages. Whereas before women weren't
even allowed to deliver the post.
You know, you would perhaps see a woman trailing in Scotland
because her husband was poorly. And she was sort of doing the
round for him and you may see a woman behind the counter
occasionally, but fundamentally women were doing that telegraphy
that I said and but that was about it.
(24:01):
So to suddenly see women doing, working in shops, you know, but
doing butchering, actually serving the the customers and
doing all of this work. This was the hospital being run
by women was going alongside of that.
So the for that period, for fouryears, for from 1914 through to
(24:23):
five years really through to 1919, women were seen on the
streets in a way that they hadn't been seen before.
The tragedy is that it all closed down afterwards and and
to my mind they had to do it allover again.
In the Second World War, it was as if everyone had forgotten
that women can do these things. So yes, there was synergy and
(24:47):
they, they certainly were very mindful of the battle that was
still on to get suffrage. And and of course they weren't.
1919 was the suffrage Act, whichI mean, it wasn't full.
It gave gave the vote to women who had property and who were
over 35 years old. And it, you know, took another
five or six years for women, allwomen, to be able to get the
(25:09):
vote. But it overturned that kind of
attitude that was there up to the First World War, which was
it was not just about, I mean there was a lot of this in the
beginning or well, you know, women have basically women have
their monthlies and and they become all emotional.
So you can't really trust their judgment.
So, so Millicent Garrett Fawcett, when she was running
(25:30):
the winning suffrage movement, just believed that if they put
forward the logical arguments ina logical way and kept putting
petitions forward, then in the end these rational men would see
sense. And of course they didn't.
But probably the bigger reason that they didn't get the vote
before the First World War is because both parties were
anxious that if women got the vote, they would vote for the
(25:52):
other party. So it wasn't in their interest
to kind of enable more people tovote for the opposition.
Whereas the kind of I think whatwhat kind of held it held the
day after the war was the thought of almost rioting on the
streets if they said that women couldn't have the vote and they
were going to treat them in the way that they had before the war
(26:14):
of arresting them and putting them in prison after everything
that they had given in the FirstWorld War.
So. So yes, there was strong synergy
and I do think that they expected, I don't think they
maybe they didn't even think about it.
I think they assumed that this is Flora and Louisa.
I think this is my own view. I think they assumed that once
(26:35):
the war was finished, they wouldbe able to be employed in any
hospital regardless of whether it was for men or not.
They would be taken on as surgeons in in ordinary
hospitals. They wouldn't have to work in
hospitals for women and childrenand of course that didn't.
Happen. No, I think it's a very
different world being war to then peacetime, where you can
(27:01):
choose what what, what rules youwant to to live by, but in more
time anything goes just to beat the other side.
There was something resonated with me, what you were saying
about recognition. Really as a woman, you've got to
get all of these points across. It reminds me of that song of
anything you can do, I can do better.
And working in tech that I had, I've been often get said
(27:25):
whatever you do, you have to do it far better than your male
counterparts just to get acknowledgement of the basics
being delivered. So.
But there was. A royal recognition?
That the the hospital received, do you want to share a little
bit about that so? Basically, George the Fifth and
his wife Mary came to visit. So Queen Mary was an interesting
(27:50):
person in herself. She she was the one that
encouraged the women to send presents, send boxes to their
soldiers, to their sons, their husbands, their brothers,
whatever, as part of the war effort.
And she also encouraged them to knit socks.
And in fact, it was Mary McCarthy, who was a fantastic
(28:12):
trade unionist when got an audience with her via her
daughter, really Princess Alexandra and said, actually
you're by encouraging women to knit socks and send them out to
the front, you're undermining the jobs that many of my women,
basically working class women do, which is doing piece work at
(28:33):
home, knitting, and you're depriving them of a livelihood.
So they're the ones now that theprime breadwinners, because
they're men folk, are out on thefront.
I think we need to rethink this scheme.
So. So they did.
And Queen Mary then encouraged them to send out cigarettes and
chocolate instead, which, you know, again today with our
(28:55):
medical knowledge and information, we know wasn't an
ideal thing. But it was interesting that
Queen Mary, you know, wanted to do her bit and to encourage
women to do their bit. But it was very much about
encouraging them to do it from the home.
So once they came once, George the Fifth and Queen Mary Kane
and they had actually laid the foundation stone for Louisa's
(29:16):
mother, Elizabeth's third and final hospital, which is the one
that you can still see. It's it's part of the unison
building on the Houston Rd. So they knew the family, they
knew the Garrett family and it was Agnes Garrett and Rhonda,
their cousin, who decorated the inside of that hospital.
And they were very impressed with the interior design.
(29:37):
So. So when Louisa and Flora had
opened their hospital, they werekind of very keen to come.
And they came in 1915 and they had, I mean Louisa and Flora had
had a lot of journalists coming when they were in France, both
French journalists and English journalists, British Red Cross
and other Red Cross and so on, to see this hospital run by
(29:59):
women. But the one in London was really
kind of Ground Zero journalists interest and and when the king
and queen visited it was even more so.
So that whole thing of this is fantastic.
The work that these women are doing, these soldiers are doing,
these, these women doctors are doing on the soldiers is is just
(30:21):
fantastic was the kind of message that went out and the
royal recognition was was important.
But for them personally it was much more important when
Emmeline Pankhurst came because you know she was the queen of
the suffrage movement and she did come and she also said you
know, well done girls. Sadly, by by the time even even
(30:43):
when the train left for with Louisa and Flora to go to Paris,
by that time her mother Elizabeth had developed vascular
dementia. So she probably did visit, but
she wouldn't really have been able to you know, relate
particularly to what they were doing.
And that was quite sad, I think,for Louisa.
(31:04):
And and indeed Elizabeth would have known what was coming
because as a doctor, as a medical doctor, once she had the
diagnosis of vascular dementia, she would have known and in some
ways it was really good that shedied in 2019.
So she didn't have it that long.It's four years because for such
an amazing mind to to lose all of those faculties would have
(31:25):
been horrendous. So.
So I think for for Louisa the next best thing was to have
Emmeline Pankhurst visit and andkind of give that
acknowledgement of of what they were doing.
And and I think as well just having all those other, I mean
all the newspapers, the Times they they created their own
little newspaper called The Gazette and that was another
(31:48):
occupation that they got the soldiers to be involved in.
But the Times in the mail and all those newspapers were
reporting on how successful theythey were doing.
So they did get that kind of recognition when it was they
were were running the hospital but it was afterwards that they
they you know they really didn'tget the recognition.
They really didn't get the support, the continuing support
(32:10):
that they wanted and that they expected.
We were talking before about theefficiency of the the female
staff and the success there, butof course that then is reflected
in the number of patients treated as well.
Phenomenal number what? 26,000, yes, it was. 1915 to
(32:32):
1919 that that's. Yeah, that's right.
And they had outpatients and they were in in charge of at
least four other kind of substations if you like.
Yeah. I mean, there were thousands,
literally thousands of patients treated and and they didn't,
those patients did not forget them and they didn't forget
their experience. They knew that this experience
was different to the experiencesthat because The thing is that
(32:56):
there were 6 postal deliveries aday and those parcels were
getting to the front within a day.
And 1/2, you know, the postal system was amazing and all that
work that the women that were running the postal system did
during the First World War, theydidn't just maintain it, they
(33:17):
expanded the postal system. So the soldiers were writing to
all of their friends, all of their family, everybody not just
from the front, but when they got back into the hospital in in
London. So people would have known about
it. You know, it wasn't just word of
mouth. It was through letters and in
the press. And they they understood that
(33:37):
this was something special that they they were receiving.
I mean there were a large numberof other kind of makeshift
hospitals that were set up. If you see Downton Abbey, you
know that they set up a hospitalin Downton Abbey in the First
World War. Well, those state sorts of
stately homes were being taken over by the lady of the house
(33:58):
and run as hospitals all across the country.
So. So that that idea of women being
involved, involved in hospitals was kind of established, women's
homes being given over to createthat homely feeling was there.
But to actually be operated on by female doctors was unique.
One of the questions then is after all of well, say, the the
(34:21):
stress and the excitement and the pioneering efforts during
the First World War peace is announced, we can now move on to
this new future. Men and women together Hurrah.
Oh, no, indeed. So they get their CB ES,
(34:41):
Commanders of the British Empire.
Actually, I think I can't. Yeah, I think it is CB ES.
It's either OB or CBE. They're recognised, you know,
they're Danes for for the work that they did.
They don't finish, they don't close the hospital until 2019.
So it's a year after the war hasended.
They're kind of allowed to finish off as it were.
But yeah, it does close. You know, the doors shut, a lot
(35:02):
of the equipment was left there and they go back to, they kind
of look at each other and think,well, what we going to do then.
So they go back to their hospital on the Harrow Rd. and
the Hospital for Women and Children and kind of pick up the
pieces and begin to start again.And Louisa did apply to four or
five hospitals to see whether she would be accepted.
(35:25):
And they said no, it's like nothing's changed.
No, no, no. You can only work with women and
children. And and Flora gets sick.
So Flora got cancer. She died in 1923.
So basically they work in the hospital between 1921 and
19/19/19, 2020-2021. And then they moved to
(35:45):
Buckinghamshire in 22. And she died in 1923.
She was 55 at the time. She was really young.
And Louisa, I think he's heartbroken but also devastated
that really they haven't achieved anything in terms of
breaking into the men's world ofmedicine, despite everything,
(36:08):
despite those, those innovations, despite 26,000
patients, men, all that. Proof.
Yeah, exactly. And approval and support.
So she doesn't continue practising in medicine.
She goes back to the family homeand she, she goes back to
Aldburgh and she's she she becomes mayor there.
(36:29):
Her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, had been the first
female mayor. I mean, she's along with so many
other things. And Louisa kind of steps into
her mother's shoes. Her mother's now died.
She becomes mayor. She does kind of bits of good
work. She helps set up other hospitals
and so on, you know, as in fundraising, but she doesn't
work in them until the Second World War.
(36:50):
And then in the Second World War, she does help out at her
mother's old hospital, the hospital warning down on the
Houston Rd. But she died in 1943.
She died in Brighton. So there's a there's a plaque,
the burial of Flora. Murray is in Penn, in the
churchyard in Penn, and there's a plaque there that's a tribute
to Flora from Louisa. And Louisa's ashes are in
(37:13):
Brighton. But you know, I think her spirit
is there in Penn, in Buckinghamshire, and really the
legacy, you know, people have touncover the legacy.
So, you know, if people wanted to know more, obviously come on
my walks, you know, the the Women in Medicine Walk or Tale
of Two Slums Walk and share it with me as we go round.
(37:35):
But, you know, the building's nolonger there because it's been
replaced with council housing. But there's more to read in the
wonderful book by Wendy Moore called Endel St.
And there's lots of kind of detail about individual nurses,
doctors and soldiers lives in inthat book.
But really, unless you know a bit about it, you're not aware.
(37:58):
I don't think I wasn't aware until I came across the plaque
and thought, what's this? And you know, it's and that is
sad. I think, you know, there should
be like a Netflix film about this.
Well, I'll just forward this podcast.
I can go to the producers, see what they can do.
(38:20):
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's it's a sad and also a happy
story about what what they were able to achieve for themselves.
They they understood their limits and they pushed those.
And yeah, I mean yeah, feeling that everything you've achieved
and proven and not being able toget through that final curtain
(38:41):
must have been really quite heartbreaking.
Especially when you're losing your your partner as well just
lost the will to to fight really.
But the fight continues now in order to to share these stories,
your Tale of Two Slums walking tour, which is around St.
Giles. I've now done twice, loved both
(39:01):
times, learnt a lot and it does show you how things are changing
on a gradual basis. Your Women in Medicine in
Houston and Fitzrovia walking tours have us a little bit more
about that. Okay.
I start with Elizabeth Garrett Andersons Hospital and do some
back story about her and then wego down to look at the statue of
(39:25):
Louisa Aldrich Brandis, who I'vealso written a little blog on
and there's a statue of her there.
She was the Dean of the London Women's Medical Training School
after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, to go past the
Cruciform which is now the Wolfson PhD Centre, which is the
hospital that was ECL Hospital. And that's where Agatha Christie
(39:47):
did her Second World War experience as an apothecrist,
having trained at the same apothecary route way that
Elizabeth Guerra Anderson had. And then we wander over to
Fitzrovia, where I tell the taleof James Barry, who was.
A woman who became a man and wasa practicing Dr. for 40 years,
would you believe? And then no one ever realized.
(40:09):
And then we work our way back down past some amazing new
buildings to the Cleveland workhouse and we end at the
wonderful Fitzrovia Chapel, which wonderfully is still
there, which is the Chapel of the hospital.
So. So UCLH is the combination of
University College London Hospital and Middlesex Hospital,
that big green and white building that you can see when
(40:31):
you come out Houston Station. And and one of the the facts
that I like to share with my groups is that I counted up how
many women consultants there were in 2023 and it was
basically 1/3, a third of the total number of consultants were
women. So it still isn't 50% and I feel
(40:53):
that Louisa and Elizabeth would both be a little bit sad that
we're we're not there yet. On the other hand, it's only
just over 100 years since we hadthe vote and it was only in, I
think it was 1976 sort of time that rape in marriage was
declared a thing. And so, you know, violence
(41:17):
against women is a relatively new thing.
We're only allowed to be awardedtheir degrees at Cambridge in
1946, which was after we had colour television.
So, you know, it's relatively recent that we've had a lot of
these developments and it's relatively recent that Louisa
and Flora were pioneering their work as female doctors operating
(41:41):
on soldiers. Yeah.
Well, Sylvia, thank you very much for that.
For those who are interested in learning a little bit more, I'll
put the links to both the the book and also Sylvia's blog post
and also links to both of her walks, A Tale of Two Slums in
Saint Charles and also Women in Medicine in Houston and
(42:03):
Fitzrovia. That's all for now.
Until next time.
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