Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/308

 E. H. Lacey in the National Portrait Gallery.

 INGLIS, ELSIE MAUD (1864–1917), physician and surgeon, the second daughter of John Inglis, of the East India Company's service, by his wife, Harriet Thompson, was born at Naini Tal, India, 16 August 1864. Her father was a descendant of the Inglis of Kingsmill, Inverness-shire. Her mother was the granddaughter of John Fendall, governor of Java. Elsie Inglis spent her childhood in India until her father retired in 1878, when the family came back to Scotland and settled in Edinburgh. She was educated there at the Charlotte Square Institution, and after a year at Paris returned to Edinburgh shortly before her mother's death in 1885. Between Elsie Inglis and her father there existed a strong bond of friendship. He was a wholehearted advocate of her choice of a medical career, and a wise counsellor in all her undertakings. At the time of her entry upon her medical studies the battle for the admission of women to the medical profession had been fought and won by Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake [q.v.], although there still remained a considerable amount of opposition. Her studies were begun in Edinburgh and continued at Glasgow, with some months in Dublin for a special course of midwifery. In 1892 she received her medical diploma, and returning to Edinburgh she inaugurated there a second school of medicine for women, a successful venture which became, after the closing of the first medical school founded in Edinburgh in 1886 by Sophia Jex-Blake, the only school of medicine for women, until the doors of Edinburgh University were thrown open to them (1894).

In 1892 Elsie Inglis was appointed house-surgeon to the New Hospital for Women in London (afterwards the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital), and later received the appointment of joint-surgeon to the Edinburgh Bruntsfield Hospital and Dispensary for women and children. Realizing the serious disabilities imposed on women by their exclusion from resident posts in the chief maternity hospital and Royal Hospital in Edinburgh, she conceived the bold scheme of establishing there a maternity hospital to be staffed by women. This scheme resulted in the foundation of a hospice for women, opened in 1901, which is still the only maternity training centre in Scotland managed by women. Dr. Elsie Inglis began private practice in 1895, first in partnership with Dr. Jessie McGregor, later by herself. In her profession she won the love and esteem of her patients in all classes of life. To the poor patients of the hospital she was more than a doctor, for they found in her a friend full of sympathy with their difficulties, and always ready to help in lightening the burden of their poverty.

In 1900 Elsie Inglis joined the constitutional movement for the political enfranchisement of women, under the leadership of Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, devoting all her spare time to speaking and lecturing on women's suffrage. She was the founder of the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation (1906), and it was at a committee meeting of the Federation in August 1914 that the idea was first conceived of forming a Scottish Women's Hospitals committee, to raise hospital units staffed by women for service in the European War. Elsie Inglis was the leading spirit of this venture, travelling all over the kingdom to make public appeals for funds to equip the units. Her enthusiasm roused a quick response from the public, resulting in a steady flow of funds and of offers from women for active service.

The first fully equipped unit left for France in November 1914, a second unit going out to Serbia in January 1915. Elsie Inglis carried on the work of organizing further units until April 1915, when she left for Serbia in order to take the place of Dr. Eleanor Soltau, who had contracted diphtheria. An epidemic of typhus, which had broken out at the end of January 1915, had nearly abated when she arrived, and she immediately proceeded to organize three hospitals in the north of Serbia in readiness for the autumn offensive of the Serbs.

The invasion of Serbia by German, Austrian, and Bulgarian armies in the autumn of 1915 drove the Serbs back, and the hospitals established at Valjevo, Lazarovatz, and Mladanovatz had to be hastily evacuated and moved to Kragujevatz, where Elsie Inglis had started a surgical hospital. The relentless tide of invasion drove the hospitals farther south to Krushevatz. Here she worked at the Czar Lazar hospital, having decided that she could give more effectual help to the Serbs by remaining at her post. This 282