The Pioneers of Endell Street
Examining the female led WWI hospital on the 75th anniversary of the NHS
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.
The 5th July saw the 75th anniversary of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.
The NHS was a pioneering plan to make healthcare free at the point of need ‘from the cradle to the grave’ for all UK citizens. Previously, healthcare had come at a cost; the NHS was brought about to address this disparity between those who could afford and those who could not.
Launched by the Minister for Health in Clement Atlee’s UK government, Aneurin Bevan, the NHS was the result of many years of hard work, attempting to create a vision for healthcare in a system that required an overhaul. As far back as 1909, a report into the Poor Law had been commissioned, headed up by Beatrice Webb, socialist politician, who argued for a better system than the one that had been in place since the Victorian era of the workhouse. The report was, however, disregarded at the time by the liberal government.
There continued to be movement towards these ideas, however. A Liverpool physician named Dr Benjamin Moore was the first to coin the phrase ‘National Health Service’ leading to his setting up of the State Medical Service Association in 1912. His ideas became ingrained in the subsequent Beveridge Plan for the NHS, albeit thirty years later.
A novel published in 1938 by a Dr AJ Cronin, The Citadel, was to also prove a turning point for the movement towards the establishment of a fairer system of healthcare. The book was a highly critical portrait of the current system, and was based on the story of a young doctor from a small Welsh mining village.
Though there was a growing consensus towards changes to the healthcare system, the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 meant that all government backed healthcare necessitated the creation of the Emergency Hospital Service to care for the wounded. This resulted in the development in 1941 of a plan by the Ministry of Health to roll-out some kind of similar system for the general public following the end of WW2. A year later, the Beveridge Report recommended a ‘comprehensive health and rehabilitation service’ which went on to lay out guidelines for the NHS that we still access today.
The essential values of the newly created NHS were that firstly, the services helped everyone; secondly, healthcare was free; and finally, that care would be provided based on need rather than ability to pay.
As a personal anecdote, my now long-gone grandfather, who fought in the second world war, used to love to tell the story of his first experience of free healthcare as a young soldier. It had been a revelation to him that he was treated with a ‘new’ drug called ‘Penicillin’, and furthermore, that this had been provided entirely free of charge!
The NHS has been through many incarnations since its inception in 1948, as demand and new medical interventions have put strain on such a huge organisation.
But what, you may well be wondering, does this potted history lesson have to do with a newsletter about literature…?
It occurred to me that as with all areas of change, the inception of the NHS came about from the work of a mixture of dedicated pioneers: doctors, politicians, and campaigners over many years. During my Masters dissertation research, I looked at the work and writing of WW1 nurses, and recently came across a book celebrating the work of two such formidable female pioneers.
In Wendy Moore’s remarkable book Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital, she tells the story of the indomitable ‘suffragette surgeons’ the hospital’s commanding officers, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson (pictured above).
Murray and Anderson were life partners who met as qualified doctors rebelling against the UK government. Anderson refused to pay tax and spent four weeks in Holloway Prison after smashing a window in a smart area of London, and Murray risked her medical career by speaking out against the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.
Seeing the outbreak of WWI in 1914 as the chance to take some radical action, the pair organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a Paris hotel. Amongst the glamour of chandeliers, they operated on wounded soldiers.
Previously held taboos of women surgeons operating on men disappeared, and the War Office invited the women to establish a large military hospital in London in 1915.
Endell Street became the only British military hospital to be completely staffed and run by women. Murray and Anderson turned the crumbling former workhouse in Covent Garden into a 573-bed hospital, locating all-female doctors, nurses and orderlies and running the unit with a suffragette-minded efficiency. Adopting their motto ‘Deeds Not Words’ from the suffragette organisation, they named their wards after female saints, other than the ‘Johnnie Walker ward’ which was placed in the basement and housed drunks who were left to sober up!
The hospital was like no other and was decorated with colourful quilts and fresh flowers in Anderson’s attempts to heal the men’s psychological injuries which she felt many soldiers were suffering. Over 5,000 books, entertainments, and outings were also provided, with convalescing soldiers even being taught needlework.
Endell Street went on to admit between 400 and 800 soldiers per month, treating more than 24,000 patients in total. As chief surgeon, Anderson and her team used pioneering treatments such as antiseptic ointment to heal septic wounds and thus prevent amputations. The medical advancement made within the unit resulted in several published research papers by The Lancet, amongst the first ever to be published by women.
Tragically, the story of this pioneering hospital came to a crushing plight towards the end of the war with the arrival of the deadly new pandemic: Spanish flu. A young Endell Street doctor first noticed this ‘most peculiar disease’ spreading through the staff and patients of the unit, and despite their amazing record on saving thousands of young men from death and disability, they were powerless against this new virus.
Like the NHS in 2020 (and all other healthcare services around the world) even the most talented and advanced medical teams are thwarted in the face of such an unknown virus, and this was a devastating blow to an otherwise remarkable and successful story of the pioneering work of two women and their team.
Sadly, following the closure of Endell Street in 1919, the UK medical schools returned to their policy of barring female students, and female doctors became once again sidelined into low-paid, low-status roles. Furthermore, in his new role as secretary for state, Winston Churchill refused to give female army doctors equal military rank, stating “nor will their services be required beyond the present emergency”.
The National Health Service of today is a different beast entirely to that which was born in 1948, and the demand versus the investment is a constant battle, though there are many medical professionals within the service striving to keep the idea of free, quality healthcare available to all, regardless of status or income.
Thankfully, the landscape for female medical professionals has changed since the trailblazing Murray and Anderson were running their all-female led hospital in the early part of the 20th century.
Loved this piece. It is a privilege to have the NHS in the UK and this really shows how, without people protesting and pushing we wouldn’t have what we do today.
Loved this! Thank you, Kate :)