After gaining her MD at Edinburgh University in 1899, Elsie Inglis established the first woman-run maternity hospital in Scotland. An advocate of women's rights, she joined the NUWSS and in 1906, helped found the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation.
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, she had the idea of sending teams of women medics to the Front. Although this was opposed by the war office, she was undeterred, and within months of the onset of hostilities, two units of the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH) were despatched to France.
In 1915, she went with the SWH to Serbia and arranged for units to be sent as far a field as Corsica and Russia. In 1917, the day after her return to England, she died from illness and exhaustion.
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