Women doctors were vital in WW1 Europe

In 1887, while women were still denied the right to vote in the Australian colonies, 7 women began medical degrees at the Melbourne Medical School and two of them graduated in 1891. And the University of Sydney Medical School first produced two women grad­uates in 1893. Yet by 1914, only two decades later, there were 130 women registered as medical practitioners across Australia. Of course their access to hospital residencies and clinical appointments was still highly restricted, but they were there!

As soon as WW1 erupted in 1914, women doctors quickly under­stood the demands it would make on doctors, nurses and other health professionals. The women doctors responded with the same mix of motives that male doctors felt – to serve God, King and country; to get away from the confines of home and see the world; and to practise their profession in a useful way.

But for women there were additional considerations. The war might enable career opportun­ities to open up for women doctors who in 1914 were still margin­alised within the profession. The thinking went that if the war continued, the need for doctors would be so great that women would be fully accepted within their profession.

Dr Louisa Anderson, British surgeon

operating on patients in Paris

Voice Newspaper also tells another story. War was an extraordinary test of the limits of the profession, and would elicit vast advances in medicine: plastic surgery, psychiatry, and innovations in the treatment of wounds and disease. Ambitious women wanted to be part of those advances.

It will surprise no-one that the Australian and the British Armed Forces refused to employ women doctors. The British Army did eventually relax the case against women doctors later in WW1, but the Australian Army did not appoint a female doctor until 1943! So women took other routes eg working for the Red Cross. Occasionally they travelled in independent medical units. Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson was the first woman in Britain to cross the Channel and set up an operating theatre in an empty hotel in Paris. Within days, she was operating on wounded French and Belgian soldiers .

Were the Australian policy makers worried that women would be killed or wounded in the war zones and were being very protective of the gentle sex? Was the army fearful that poor hygiene and limited supplies would endanger the standards of Australian health care delivered in Europe? Apparently not. At least 2,500 qualified and experienced Australian nurses successfully served overseas during WWI. This suggests that it wasn’t being female that bothered the army. Rather it was that war was Men’s Business; female doctors would be officers and authority figures, a role in war that would be offensive to men.

Australian Dr Agnes Bennett 1916-1917 

She was the commanding officer of the 7th Medical Unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service in Macedonia and Serbia.

And another piece of evidence. Due to a lack of medical officers in 1917 and 1918, a number of Australian theatre sisters worked as nurse anaesthetists in Casualty Clearing Stations in France. The army was desperate and I am delighted that 9 Australian nurses were given permission by the Australian authorit­ies to participate - the British Army provided three months’ training for Australian, British and New Zealand nurses in the use of chloro­form and ether. Yet the same authorities could have easily permitted women doctors to work in the Casualty Clearing Stations in France, partially solving the core problem: lack of medical officers.

In the event, it seems that twenty five Australian women doctors served in WW1. But because they were not allowed to serve in an Aust­ralian unit because of our governmental policy, their contribution has never been formally recog­nised here in Australia. They HAD to serve in other units overseas.

Looking For the Evidence is full of excellent examples. In 1914 Dr Katie Ardill applied to serve with the Austral­ian Expeditionary Forces and was of course refused. So she made her own way to Egypt in 1915 and then onto Britain where she joined the British Expeditionary Forces as one of the first women doctors in field services. Dr Ardill was appointed to the medical staff at the County Middlesex War Hospital in St Albans in 1915. Her next appointment was at the Anglo-Belgian Military Hospital in Calais and was appointed to the rank of Captain. Under the British Red Cross Society, she worked in a Belgian hospital and then the Citadel Hospital in Cairo. Altogether Dr Ardill served for four years in Britain, France, Belgium and Egypt. Dr Agnes Bennett was also from Sydney. Serving with the French Red Cross, Dr Bennett became the first female commissioned officer in the British Army in 1915, when as a captain she worked in war hospitals in Cairo. In 1916-17 she was in charge of a unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals on the Serbian front.