The Women's Hospital Corps: forgotten surgeons of the First World War

Under the leadership of the former militant suffragists Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, a group of women doctors calling themselves the Women's Hospital Corps (WHC) successfully ran two military hospitals in France from September 1914 to January 1915. In 1915 the War Office invited them to run a military hospital in London where large numbers of new beds were being created. It gave them former workhouse premises in Covent Garden, which they transformed into a 573-bed hospital, staffed and administered entirely by women. The Endell Street Military Hospital, the first hospital in the UK established for men by medical women, was open from May 1915 to December 1919; in that time, its doctors saw 26,000 patients and performed over 7000 major operations. A key feminist organization of the First War, the WHC has largely been forgotten, partly because of its relatively small size and partly because of its anomalous status as a female-run hospital under the direct patronage of the War Office.