ENDELL STREET
THE TRAILBLAZING WOMEN WHO RAN WORLD WAR ONE’S MOST REMARKABLE MILITARY HOSPITAL
WENDY MOORE
Atlantic, 376pp, £17.99
Medical journalist and historian Wendy Moore’s book couldn’t have been published at a better time to hail the astonishing careers of two pioneering women surgeons, former suffragettes who in the First World War set up and ran military hospitals in Paris and London. As Ysenda Maxtone Graham put it in the Times: ‘Louisa Garrett Anderson (born in 1877) was the chief surgeon, and Flora Murray (born 1869) the chief physician. What a couple! And they were a couple. They lived together in a small flat in a wing of the hospital with two spoilt Scottish terriers. They were extraordinary, visionary, unflagging, superb as doctors, and terrifying.’ Ann Kennedy Smith in the
Guardian set the scene: ‘The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action. Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive X-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. In early 1915 they were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.’
In the Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson praised ‘a riveting story’ and in the Evening Standard, Philippa Stockley was bowled over: ‘Rarely is a book so important, so timely. Vividly and meticulously written, Endell Street is a masterpiece to stretcher straight into a major film studio. What material!’ This is, said Maxtone Graham, ‘the best book I’ve read about the First World War since Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth’.