Louisa Garrett Anderson's Endell St Hospital

"Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital" by Wendy Moore — our next Zoom talk. 

Mardie Hodgson, Transport Officer		Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray

When the First World War broke out in 1914 dozens of women doctors offered their services — but they were told by the British Army to “Go home and sit still”.  Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson refused to sit still.  Both qualified doctors and suffragettes — and also life partners — they took a team of women doctors and nurses to Paris.  They ran a hospital there so successfully that the army invited them to open a second hospital in Boulogne and then — in May 1915 — to run a major military hospital in the heart of London.  Endell Street was unique.  It was the only hospital within the British Army to be staffed by women — all the doctors, nurses and orderlies were female apart from a dozen or so male helpers.  The women of Endell Street treated 24,000 wounded soldiers who were shipped back from the frontline in France, Gallipoli and elsewhere throughout the war.  After the war the hospital remained open to treat victims of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic.  Endell Street became renowned as the ‘most popular’ hospital in the First World War — but that did nothing to help its women pioneers when peace came.

		Wendy Moore

Wendy Moore, author of "ENDELL STREET: The Women who ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital", reveals the startling story of these pioneering women.  Wendy is a freelance journalist and the author of five books on medical and social history.  ENDELL STREET was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Louisa Garrett Anderson was a daughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Mayor of Aldeburgh, who was the first female mayor in Britain, and the first woman to openly gain a medical qualification in Britain.  The Garretts were major employers and philanthropists in our immediate area for some two centuries.  Visit our «Garretts» page here.