Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian
armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful campaign in
spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most
primitive conditions of existence, every service from bookkeeping to
bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water was done by women’s
hands. It was not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. They
came into Serbia through fields of white poppies and fields of equally
thick white crosses over fresh graves. They faced a country that was
overcome with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged through the
hospitals where patients lay three in a bed, and under the beds and
in the corridors and on the steps and on the grass outside. After
months of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally abated, the
enemy again overran Serbia and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily
evacuating, retreated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors
were taken prisoners and obliged to spend months with the German and
Austrian armies before their release. Others joined in the desperate
undertaking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian
nation fleeing over the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But
the Scottish women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr.
Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards
powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As
regards morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the
capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater
than anything we ever knew before about women.”
Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where
are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the
practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English
medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident
physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was
a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly
tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors
practically to forget it. And he had to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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