By Alison Caldwell
A Melbourne historian is calling for a honour board at the Australian War Memorial to commemorate 25 determined female surgeons who made their way to Europe to serve in World War I despite being refused enlistment.
While their male counterparts had no difficulty being enlisted, the women were denied because male army chiefs did not think war was a place for women.
Among the women was Vera Scantlebury, from Melbourne.
A paediatrician, she took herself across the seas to London where she worked at the Endell Street Military Hospital in Covent Garden for two years.
The hospital was staffed entirely by women.
Her daughter, Catherine James Bassett, said she remembered her mother as a dynamo who was a kindly and loving person.
“She was a person of courage, inspiration. She was known at the Endell Street Military Hospital by the soldiers as the Little Doctor,” Ms Bassett said.
In her spare time Dr Scantlebury wrote letters to her parents in Melbourne — 3,000 pages’ worth. They are now in the University of Melbourne archives.
Historian Heather Sheard is writing a book about the female surgeons of World War I.
“My research shows that there were about 24 — and four to six New Zealand doctors as well — women doctors,” she said.
Dr Sheard said the female surgeons provided a whole range of medical services, including amputations, removing shrapnel and treating infectious diseases.
They acted primarily as surgeons but they were also very important as pathologists, anaesthetists and medical officers.
“In part it was exactly the same as their male colleagues. They had a strong sense of duty, they wanted to use their medical skills to assist with the wounded, but for women there were extra reasons,” Dr Sheard said.
“Firstly they really wanted to prove that they could do it, that they could actually administer and manage and do the sort of surgery — trauma surgery you’d call it nowadays — just the same as their male colleagues were doing.”
They were not enlisted by Australia or Britain.
Even at the end at 1916 when the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) was so short of doctors that they started to hire women, they really did hire them rather than enlist them.
The women were not allowed to wear the RAMC uniform or badges until nearly the end of the war and they were not permitted to wear the badges of rank.
Agnes Bennett, from Sydney, was another surgeon. She treated wounded soldiers from Gallipoli and later headed a field hospital in Serbia.
A fellow Sydney professional, pathologist Elsie Dalyell, worked in France, Malta, Greece and Serbia.
Mary De Garis headed a hospital camp in remote Serbia and survived bombings, extreme cold and epidemics.
Dr Sheard would like the Australian War Memorial to erect an honour board for the female surgeons of World War I.
“Ultimately we would because doctors, women doctors, came from Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to go to the war so it would be the logical and rational place to put something,” she said.
Returning to Melbourne in 1919, Dr Scantlebury married (and changed her name to Dr Scantlebury Brown) and went on to become Victoria’s first state director of infant welfare, a post she held for 20 years until she died in 1946.
Dr Sheard said Dr Scantlebury Brown was the visionary for the universal, secular and free health system that Victoria has today.