Dr. Stoney recently reported that considerably over 5000 cases had passed through her hands since she came to this hospital. She has a staff of V.A.D. assistants, two of whom she has trained in the work sufficiently to enable them to take over X-ray installations. One is now working in Rumania, and the other in London. Dr. Stoney’s splendid work has completely overcome any prejudice which may have attached to her as a woman when she first took up her post. Although she is the only woman doctor in the hospital, she works on an equal footing with the men, except that she holds no military rank.
Miss Edith Stoney is a woman of great university distinction, having been wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. She was an Associate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Lecturer in Physics to the London University. Astronomy is another subject on which she has lectured, and while at Newnham College she had charge of the telescope. She has also done valuable original work in relation to searchlights.
At the beginning of the war Miss Stoney joined the committee of the Women’s Imperial Service League, and helped in the organisation of the hospital unit with which her sister went to Antwerp, fitting up the portable X-ray apparatus, which was subsequently of such great service. After the transfer of the hospital to Cherbourg she continued to assist in the organisation of its supplies. Her real war work, however, may be said to have begun when she retired from her work as Lecturer in Physics in the spring of 1915 and joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.
Miss Stoney first took up work at the tent hospital at Troyes, where she put up and ran the X-ray department, giving invaluable assistance to the surgeons by the accurate localisation of foreign bodies in wounds. The head surgeon, Dr. Louise M’Ilroy, stated that she never failed to find a projectile searched for. This was indeed a tribute to the accurate localisation in the X-ray department. Another valuable branch of Miss Stoney’s work was the taking of stereoscopic skiagrams. Miss Stoney took one of the very early skiagrams of gas bubbles in the tissues, due to gas gangrene, a development which has since come into great prominence.
In the autumn of 1915 Miss Stoney accompanied the hospital unit from Troyes when it was ordered to Serbia by the French authorities. Before leaving for Serbia she had the foresight to equip herself in Paris with a portable engine, as she was determined that her department should be efficient. On the committee refusing to sanction the expense, she bought it herself. Miss Stoney’s action was soon justified, for when the hospital was installed at Gevgheli in Serbia there was no electric supply. Thanks to her engine, not only was this the only British hospital able to work X-rays, but incidentally, as a by-product of the X-ray department, Miss Stoney lighted the entire hospital with electricity. The need of much electric light in the dark winter days meant hard work for Miss Stoney, and the following extract from a letter conjures up a picture of work in no easy conditions:
“The electric light was needed in the pharmacy until the doctors had finished, and it was often late before I could stop the little engine and pack it up warm for the night.... When I creaked up the ladders in stockinged feet to the loft where fifty-four of us slept, there could be no thought of washing, with ice already in the jug; it was often an inch and a half thick by morning. Instead of undressing, one piled on every scrap of extra clothes one had, and put one’s waterproof under the mattress to stop the draught up through it.”
When the French retreated from Gevgheli, a site was found for the hospital just outside Salonika, on a bit of ill-drained, marshy ground. There again the engine proved invaluable. From January, 1916, onwards Miss Stoney has run the X-ray department, doing, besides her own work, many radiograms for British and French doctors from other hospitals, who referred their cases to her for examination.
At Salonika Miss Stoney again lit the hospital with electric light. For several months she was obliged to attend to the engine entirely alone, owing to the illness of the only mechanic. She further set up treatment by high frequency for the patients, and radiant heat baths with vibratory massage. Having previously studied the Zander treatment, Miss Stoney was able to instal an apparatus, which, though she describes it as rough, was very successful in treating stiff joints requiring movement. She also used ionisation for healing wounds with beneficial results.
In all these ways Miss Stoney has been able to bring her knowledge of physics to the service of the wounded. She has been a pioneer in her work in this physical department which she has originated and developed at Salonika. “It is easy to work X-rays,” she writes, “when someone else has installed them; but in a moving hospital, in difficult circumstances, physics is a help in getting the apparatus up and working well. We put in order the X-ray outfits of two British hospital ships calling at Salonika. The doctors and mechanics on board had not just the needed physics, but could work the apparatus perfectly well when it was installed.”
The Serbian Government has decorated Miss Stoney with the Order of St. Sava in recognition of her services. But the reward of her fine work lies in the gratitude of the scores of her patients who owe their renewed health largely to her indomitable energy, and the wonderful ingenuity and resource with which in conditions of abnormal difficulty she has brought so many projects to a successful and practical issue. Writing of her work lately, Miss Stoney says: “There is always sadness, but there is endless variety and interest in the life, and one trusts that the great privilege of easing a drop in the vast ocean of pain, so bravely borne, may have been ours.”