Women as Army Surgeons: Being the History of the Women's Hospital Corps in Paris, Wimereux and Endell Street, September 1914-October 1919

When the war began in 1914, the British medical establishment had little use for women doctors. Flora Murray and her colleague Louisa Garrett Anderson changed that forever. This is their account of building the Women's Hospital Corps from nothing into a functioning military hospital system that the War Office could no longer ignore. The book chronicles their journey: the initial rejection by French authorities, the makeshift hospital in Paris, the work at Wimereux, and finally their triumph with Endell Street Military Hospital in London, staffed entirely by women. Murray writes with quiet ferocity about the bureaucratic battles they fought alongside the medical ones. This isn't nostalgia or self-congratulation. It's a careful, determined record of what women could do when given the chance, written by two surgeons who made that chance impossible to deny.