Powell Women in the War Zone

Hospital Service in the First World War
1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6951-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

In our collective memory, the First World War is dominated by men. The sailors, soldiers, airmen and politicians about whom histories are written were male, and the first half of the twentieth century was still a time when a woman's place was thought to be in the home. It was not until the Second World War that women would start to play a major role both in the armed forces and in the factories and the fields. Yet there were some women who were able to contribute to the war effort between 1914 and 1918, mostly as doctors and nurses. In Women in the War Zone, Anne Powell has selected extracts from first-hand accounts of the experiences of those female medical personnel who served abroad during the First World War. Covering both the Western and the Eastern Fronts, from Petrograd to Basra and from Antwerp to the Dardanelles, they include nursing casualties from the Battle of Ypres, a young doctor put in charge of a remote hospital in Serbia and a nurse who survived a torpedo attack, albeit with serious injuries. Filled with stories of bravery and kindliness, it is a book that honours the often unsung contribution made by the female doctors and nurses who helped to alleviate some of the suffering of the First World War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Powell, Anne

Leseproben

Introduction

Women’s involvement in the art of healing stretches back to pre-history. From the Bible we glimpse the well-loved image of Jesus in Bethany a few days before His crucifixion. A woman came to Him carrying an alabaster box which contained ointment made from oil extracted from the aromatic root of the small plant spikenard. The antifungal and anti-bacterial properties of spikenard were relaxing and according to the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, the woman poured them on Jesus’s head. Saint John wrote that she anointed His feet with the ointment and ‘wiped his feet with her hair and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’.

During the Middle Ages monastries and convents were centres of healing and medical knowledge. Physic plants were grown in the gardens and then gathered, pounded into powder, and mixed with oils, vinegar and wine to produce tinctures and remedies. Diseases and cures were linked to hot, cold, dry and moist elements; and in the sixth century Alexander of Tralles wrote that the duty of a physician was ‘to cool what is hot, to warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten what is dry.’

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 and at the age of eight she entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg on the Rhine. By the time Hildegard took her vows when she was fourteen the monastery had extended into a convent. She became Abbess in 1136 and eleven years later she founded her own Abbey at Rupertsberg near Bingen. Already known for her sacred music her fame spread after Pope Eugene III read from her visionary work Scivas at the Synod of Trier in the winter of 1147–8. During her early years as a nun Hildegard would have helped in the gardens and the infirmary at Disibodenberg, learning how to tend the plants and the various methods of treating the elderly, infirm, blind, deaf, lame and sick. She became practised in the knowledge of herbal remedies and between 1152 and 1158, when she was abbess at Rupertsberg, she wrote two medicinal works, Causae et Cyurae, which examined the causes and cures of diseases, and Physica – consisting of nine books on healing. The medical uses and preparations for different remedies are given for plants, trees, fish, animals, reptiles, birds, stones, gems and elements.

In her lifetime Hildegard of Bingen was revered and renowned for her gifts of healing. The physicians of Myddfai, a remote hamlet in the foothills of the Black Mountains in mid-Wales, were active between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. They listed over 800 herbal remedies for healing the sick and wounded in body and mind, in a collection of medieval texts. Legend tells that Rhiwallon, the first physician of Myddfai, was the eldest son of a young farmer and the lady of Llyn-y-Fan-Fach. Some years after she returned to the lake the lady appeared to Rhiwallon at Llidiad-y-Meddygon, which is still known as the Physicians’ Gate. She told him that he was destined to become a great and skilful physician, who would relieve pain and misery through his gift for healing. She gave him a bag containing herbal remedies and on another appearance took him to Pant-y-Meddygon, the Dingle of the Physicians. She showed him the many plants that grew there and explained their various medical powers. One of these may have been solidago asteraceae (golden rod) which originally came from the Middle East, and was later cultivated in Britain for its medicinal properties. It was known as woundwort – a wound-healing plant. A cold compress placed on a fresh wound was believed to be antiinflammatory. But golden rod is not listed in the Herbal compiled by the first Physicians of Myddfai which gives many remedies for wounds: ‘Take wild turnips, pound to a plaster, and apply to the wound: it will open the wound and heal it. Proven’; ‘Take the herb called centaury, powder and cast into the wound; by God’s help it will cure it.’

The descendants of Rhiwallon and his sons continued to practise medicine in Wales without a break until Dr Rice Williams died in Aberystwyth in 1842, aged eighty-five. He seems to have been the last of the Physicians of Myddfai descended from the legendary Lady of the Lake.

Hildegard of Bingen was known as one of the first women doctors, but over the following eight centuries women struggled continuously in a bitter battle to be accepted by medical schools to train as physicians. In 1865, twenty-three years after the death of the last Physician of Myddfai, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson gained a diploma from the Society of Apothecaries. She then established a dispensary for women in London and seven years later she founded the New Hospital for Women, which was to be staffed only by women. In 1908 women were granted permission to obtain diplomas and fellowships from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. However, they were not accepted into the teaching hospitals in London, Oxford and Cambridge and those who qualified elsewhere were only offered posts not taken up by men – either in the provinces or in some women’s hospitals.

Elsie Inglis qualified in medicine in Glasgow in 1892, and became a doctor in Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s New Hospital for Women. By this time the women’s suffrage movement in Britain, which had started in 1867, was revitalised by the creation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Dr Inglis returned to Edinburgh in 1894 and ran a practice in the city with Dr Jessie MacGregor, an old student friend. She also became honorary secretary of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage. In November 1899 she opened her own small hospital in George Square for patients from the poorer areas of the city. After the lease expired she found another suitable property, The Hospice, which opened in January 1904 as a surgical and gynaecological centre with a dispensary and accident department. Five years later, Dr Inglis, by now Edinburgh’s most eminent woman doctor, became honorary secretary to the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

When war broke out on 4 August 1914, the Women’s Hospital Corps (WHC) was formed immediately by two women doctors – Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray. Within weeks, having been rebuffed by the War Office, the WHC was on its way to Paris at the request of the French Red Cross. The seventy-eight-yearold Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘a dignified figure, old and rather bent’, was on Victoria Station to bid farewell to her daughter and the all-women unit. ‘Twenty years younger, I would have taken them myself,’ she said.

As there were no vacancies in the WHC for Dr Elsie Inglis she went to Edinburgh Castle and offered her services to the Royal Army Medical Corps. She was rudely rejected with the words: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’Although angry she remained undaunted and at the Committee meeting of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies on 12 August her proposal was accepted that the Federation should ‘give organised help to Red Cross work.’ However, the British Red Cross, following the War Office example, refused to allow women doctors to serve with the army overseas. Eight days after the meeting a letter was sent to the Belgian, French, Russian and Serbian embassies offering fully equipped hospitals, staffed entirely by women, to their governments.

An appeal for donations was launched and meetings were held in ‘every sort of hall and drawing-room in every part of the United Kingdom’. Money flowed in and by 31 October the first £1,000 had been raised. On the previous day Dr Elsie Inglis formed the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) Committee when it was decided that the uniform should be a grey coat and skirt with Gordon tartan facings. Units were organised; one under Dr Alice Hutchison, and staffed with ten trained nurses, established a hospital in Calais in December 1914 where typhoid patients in the French army were nursed for three months. Also in December 1914 another unit was despatched to France and one was sent to Serbia.

Royaumont, a beautiful, medieval Cistercian abbey, some thirty miles north of Paris, was requisitioned by the French authorities for the SWH. When Elsie Inglis saw the building she wrote that it would be ‘one of the finest hospitals in France’. The unit of seven doctors, ten nurses, seven orderlies, two cooks, a clerk, an administrator, two maids and four chauffeurs, arrived at Royaumont at the beginning of December 1914. They found the abbey in a terrible condition with years of dirt and debris in all the huge rooms and realised that an enormous amount of work was needed to convert the Abbey into an efficient hospital. Cecily Hamilton, a forty-two-year-old actress, playwright, writer and suffragist, was Royaumont’s clerk and wrote:

Our only available stove – a mighty erection in the kitchen which had not been lit for a decade – was naturally short-tempered at first, and the supply of hot water was very limited. So, in consequence, was our first washing; at times very limited indeed. Our equipment, after the fashion of baggage in these times of war, was in no great hurry to arrive;until it arrived we did without sheets and blankets, wrapped ourselves in rugs and overcoats at night, and did not do much undressing.

The unit worked through bitterly cold weather, overcoming various setbacks, and on 10 January 1915 Royaumont was recognised as a military hospital. The following day the first six patients were received. The hospital was not closed until March 1919. During these years almost 11,000 patients, mainly from the French and French Colonial armies, were admitted to Royaumont and the additional hospital at Villers-Cotterets.

Over the following four years the Scottish Women’s Hospitals cared for wounded...