No Man's Land
The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I.
A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris, where they opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields. Although, prior to the war and the Spanish flu, female doctors were restricted to treating women and children, Flora and Louisa's work was so successful that the British Army asked them to set up a hospital in the heart of London. Nicknamed the Suffragettes' Hospital, Endell Street soon became known for its lifesaving treatments.
In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Moore (The Mesmerist) delivers a crisp, novelistic portrait of the Endell Street Military Hospital, the only WWI British army hospital staffed entirely by women (with the exception of a few male security guards and orderlies), and the two doctors who ran it. Recognizing the opportunity WWI offered for female doctors to prove their worth (they had previously had been limited to treating women and children), Louisa Garrett Anderson, a surgeon whose mother was "the first woman to qualify in Britain as a doctor," and Flora Murray, a physician and anesthetist, opened an emergency hospital for wounded soldiers in Paris. The success of that venture, as well as fears that hospitals were becoming "dangerously understaffed" as male doctors and medical students entered military service, led to an invitation from the War Office to run a 1,000-bed hospital in London. Committed suffragists and "partners in their private lives" as well as in their work, Anderson and Murray named the hospital's wards after female saints, performed innovative surgical procedures, and earned acclaim for running the hospital "with both military precision and homey domesticity." Drawing on diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, Moore narrates with verve and precision, highlighting the pressures and obstacles these women and their staff faced. Readers interested in medical, military, and women's histories will savor this sterling account.
