Elsie Maud Inglis

ELSIE Inglis was not born in Scotland but to those who remember her achievements, that is just a matter of geography. The woman who would become one of the country's first female surgeons, a leading suffragette and a true heroine of the grim field hospitals of the First World War is rightly regarded with enduring respect and affection - almost a century after her death.

Born in 1864 in India, Elsie Maud Inglis was the daughter of an employee of the East India Company. She and her Scottish parents returned to Edinburgh in 1874, and it soon became clear that young Elsie was not only bright but also willing to take on a challenge. She studied medicine - in Edinburgh, Dublin, and Glasgow - at a time when women had only just been allowed to enter the profession but were still far from accepted as equals to men.

She qualified in 1892 and later became a surgeon at the former Bruntsfield Hospital in Edinburgh. But the prejudice she experienced from male colleagues, combined with what she perceived as a desperate need for dedicated women's health services, inspired her to found a maternity hospital, staffed only by women. It opened in 1901 at Abbeyhill, and despite its closure in 1988, the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital is still fondly remembered by many Edinburgh people today.

Inglis was determined to advance not only better medical treatment for women, but equal rights to men. She founded the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation in 1906, which campaigned to give women the right to vote, and became its secretary, energetically attracting support by organising events including a famous march through the capital.

In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, a committee meeting of the federation hit on the idea of sending women to the war – not to do battle, but to set up field hospitals to care for the wounded. Inglis set about establishing the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, an the idea which so captured the public imagination that donations flooded in from around the world.

The British government and even the Red Cross rejected her brave offer of help – she was famously told, "Lady, go home and sit still" – but France and Serbia were either more enlightened, or more desperately in need of field surgeons and gratefully accepted. Fourteen mobile surgical units were sent, including one led by Inglis herself, which arrived in Serbia in 1915.

The women had steeled themselves for the worst but could not have prepared themselves for the horror they faced, with both soldiers and civilians starving and vulnerable to outbreaks of diphtheria and typhoid.

Writing of the horrible conditions in Serbia, Inglis said: "[The] hospital compound was a truly terrible place – the sights and smells beyond description. We dug into the ground the rubbish, emptied the overflowing cesspools, built incinerators, and cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. It was not the pleasantest or easiest work in the world."

They pressed on, even when the Serbian forces were being pushed back by the Austrians. Inglis was captured, and spent some time working in a military hospital, looking after prisoners, before she was sent back to Britain in 1916.

Undaunted by her experience, Inglis returned a year later to help the Serbs, who were by then fighting in Russia. But after enduring the harsh conditions on the front line, her own health was broken, and she died the same year from cancer, aged 53.

Her funeral was held in Edinburgh with full military honours, the coffin draped with the flags of Britain and Serbia. She was posthumously awarded high honours by France, Russia and Serbia. The Serbs said at the time, "Scotland made her a doctor, but Serbia made her a saint."

Winston Churchill predicted that Inglis' humanitarian efforts would not be forgotten in her own land, saying: "The record of their work, lit up by the fame of Dr Inglis, will shine in history."

Sadly, there has been no official memorial for relatives and admirers to commemorate Inglis, and neither she nor her brave nurses received formal honours by Britain during their lifetimes.