When WWI broke out, a group of female, British-trained physicians offered their services to the British War Office to serve as triage physicians and surgeons on the front line. Their offer was declined: they were told they could take the places of medical men who left practices and positions in England, but they would not be allowed to join the British medical teams at the front. This did not deter a group of them, among them Dr Elsie Inglis, who started the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, and Dr Dorothea Clara Maude, (1879-1959) who travelled independently to serve with five different field hospitals in France, Belgium and Serbia.
In fact, Serbia was one of the first beneficiaries of the women’s offer of medical aid: through 1914 and 1915, hundreds of British women, including physicians, nurses, cooks, ambulance drivers and “grande dames” of English society travelled to war zones to set up hospitals that aided Serbian military and civilian wounded and helped check typhoid and malaria epidemics. Many of these hospitals were not only run by women, but were also staffed almost entirely by women. Funds were raised independently. In addition to being initiatives set up to aid allies, these field hospitals also served to show those back in England that women did possess the intelligence, stamina and wherewithal to be counted equal to men, even as women continued to campaign for suffrage.
Dr Maude read science at Somerville College before going on to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. In 1915, at age thirty-five, she left her Oxford practice to travel to Serbia. She spent the better part of the next two years in Serbia, Corfu and Salonika with the Serbs.
Dr. Marianne Fedunkiw is a Toronto historian, writer and playwright. She is the author of three books including Rockefeller Foundation Funding and Medical Education in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax (2005) and a novel about life after the PhD, A Degree of Futility (2014) as well as more than 75 articles on topics ranging from ice hockey to medical history. She has written for The Globe and Mail, various medical publications and was part of the team that started The Discovery Channel in Canada. She has a PhD in medical history, an MA in journalism and did a fellowship at University of Oxford (UK). When she is not working on plays dealing with medical history or her latest novel, Marianne currently works as a communications consultant within the university and healthcare sectors.
Mini Presentation: A Portuguese Ancestry Story. Speaker Devin Meireles is a family historian with expertise in the Azores.
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