Dr. Elsie Maud Inglis

Elsie Maud Inglis was born in Naini Tal, India, where her father worked in the Indian Civil Service, instilling in his daughters the conviction that women were entitled to equal education and professional careers. Returning to Scotland, Inglis studied medicine at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women founded by Sophia Jex-Blake, before completing her training at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and qualifying as a physician and surgeon in 1892.

Appalled by the substandard medical treatment available to working-class women and infants, Inglis established The Hospice in Edinburgh in 1904, a maternity hospital staffed exclusively by female doctors. Concurrently, she became a prominent leader in the women's suffrage movement, serving as honorary secretary of the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Inglis offered the services of organized female medical units to the British War Office, only to be dismissed by an official who told her: 'My good lady, go home and sit still.' Undaunted, Inglis mobilized the suffrage movement to form the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service. Over the course of the war, she raised funds to field fourteen independent female-staffed mobile field hospitals across France, Serbia, Salonika, and Romania, combating typhus and performing amputations under artillery fire in Serbia where she was decorated with the Order of the White Eagle.