The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dr. Elsie Inglis, by Lady Frances Balfour

Transcriber’s Note

Notes about the transcription can be found at [the end] of the book.

DR. ELSIE INGLIS

Frontispiece

DR. ELSIE INGLIS

DR. ELSIE INGLIS, 1916

DR. ELSIE INGLIS

BY

LADY FRANCES BALFOUR

AUTHOR OF ‘THE LIFE OF LADY VICTORIA CAMPBELL’

‘LIFE AND LETTERS OF REV. JAMES MACGREGOR, D.D.’

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

TO

SERBIA

AND THE

SCOTTISH WOMEN’S HOSPITALS

THAT SERVED AND LOVED

THEIR BRETHREN

1914–1917

‘In your patience possess ye your souls.’

PREFACE

The story of Elsie Inglis needs little introduction. From first to last she was the woman nobly planned. She achieved what she did because she was ready when the opportunity came. Consistently she had lived her life, doing whatever her hand found to do with all her might, and ever following the light. She had the spirit of her nation and of her race: the spirit of courageous adventure, the love of liberty, and equal freedom for all people.

If this memoir represents her faithfully, it is because it has been written among her own family and kindred. Every letter or story of her is part of a consistent whole. Transparently honest, warmly affectioned to all, the record could hardly err if, following exactly her footprints in the sands of time, it presents a portrait of one of old Scotia’s truest daughters. I owe manifold thanks to her sisters, her friends, her patients, above all, to her Units, for the help they have given me in what has been a labour of love and growing respect. She, being dead, yet speaketh; and, while we thank our God for every remembrance of her, we hope that those who are her living memorials, the patients in the Hospice, and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, will not be forgotten by those who read and pass on the pilgrim way.

The design for the book cover has been drawn by Dr. Inglis’ countryman, Mr. Anning Bell. It is the emblem of her nation and of the S.W.H.

F. B.

[CONTENTS]

CHAPTER I
INGLIS OF KINGSMILLS, INVERNESS-SHIRE

PART I
AMERICA

‘Their graves are scattered far and wide,

O’er mountain, stream and sea.’

‘God of our fathers! be the God

Of their succeeding race.’

Among the records of the family from whom Elsie Inglis was descended there are letters which date back to 1740. In that year the property of Kingsmills, Inverness-shire, was in the hands of Hugh Inglis. He had three sons, George, Alexander, and William. George inherited Kingsmills, and the Inglis now in Inverness are descended from him. Alexander, the great-grandfather of Elsie, married Mary Deas, and about 1780 emigrated to Carolina, leaving his four children to be educated in Scotland, in charge of his brother, William Inglis. The portrait of Alexander, in the dress of the period, has the characteristic features of the race descended from him. The face is stamped with the impress of a resolute, fearless character, one who was likely to leave his mark on any country in which he took up his abode. There is an account of the property and estates of Alexander Inglis of Charleston ‘merchant in his own right.’ The account sets forth how the estates are confiscated on account of the loyalty of the said Alexander, and his adherence to, and support of the British Government and constitution.

In the schedule of property there occur, in close relation, these items: 125 head of black cattle, £125; 69 slaves at £60 a head, £4140; a pew, No. 31 in St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, £150; 11 house negroes, £700; and a library of well-chosen books, at a much lower figure. Alexander never lost sight of the four children left in his native land. In 1784 he congratulates his son David on being Dux of his class, and says that he prays constantly for him.

ALEXANDER INGLIS (d. 1791)
GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF DR. ELSIE INGLIS

Mary Deas, Alexander Inglis’ wife, through her ancestor Sir David Dundas, was a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce. All that is known of her life is contained in the undated obituary notice of the American newspaper of the day:—

‘The several duties of her station in life she discharged as became the good Christian, supporting with exemplary fortitude the late trying separation from her family.’

Alexander’s restless and adventurous life was soon to have a violent end.

After their mother’s death, the three daughters must have joined their father in America. One of them, Katherine, whose face has been immortalised by Raeburn, writes to her brother David, who had been left in Scotland, to inform him of the death of their father in a duel.

MRS. ROBERTSON, née KATHERINE INGLIS
GREAT-AUNT OF DR. ELSIE INGLIS
(Portrait by Raeburn)

The letter which Alexander Inglis wrote to be given to his children, should he fall in the duel, is as fresh and clear as on the day when it was written:—

‘My dear, dear Children,—If ever you receive this letter it will be after my death. You were present this morning when I received the grossest insult that could be offered me—and such as I little expected from the young man who dared to offer it. Could the epithets which in his passion he ventured to make use of be properly applied to me—I would not wish to live another hour, but as a man of honour, and the natural guardian and protector of everything that is dear and valuable to myself and to you, I have no alternative left, but that of demanding reparation for the injury I have received. If I fall—I do so in defence of that honour, which is dearer to me than life. May that great, gracious and good Being, who is the protector of innocence, and the sure rewarder of goodness, bless, preserve and keep you.—I am, my dear, dear children, your affectionate father,

‘Alexr. Inglis.

‘Charleston,
‘Tuesday evening, 29 March 1791.’

The letter is addressed by name to the four children.

Katherine writes to her brother David in the following May:—

‘In what manner, my dearest brother, shall I relate to you the melancholy event that has befallen us. Our dear parent, the best of fathers, is no more. How shall I go on? Alas! you will hear too soon by whose hand he fell; therefore I will not distress you with the particulars of his death. The second day of our dear father’s illness he called us to his bedside, when he told us he had left a letter for us three and his dear boy which would explain all things. Judge if you are able, my dear brother, what must have been our thoughts on this sad occasion to see our only dear parent tortured with the most excruciating pains and breathing his last. We were all of us too young, my brother, to experience the heavy loss we met with when our dear mother died, we had then a good father to supply our wants. I have always thought the Almighty kind to all His creatures, but more so in this particular that He seldom deprives us of one friend without raising another to comfort us. My dear sisters and self are at present staying with good Mrs. Jamieson, who is indeed a truly amiable woman. I am sure you will regard her for your sisters’ sakes. You are happily placed, my brother, under the care of kind uncles and aunts who will no doubt (as they ever have done) prove all you have lost. How happy would it make me in my present situation to be among my friends in Scotland, but as that is impossible for some time I must endeavour to be as happy as I can. My kind duty to uncle and aunts.—I am, my dearest brother, your truly affectionate sister,

‘Katherine Inglis.’

Thus closes the chapter of Alexander Inglis and Mary Deas, his wife, both ‘long, long ago at rest’ in the land of their exile, both bearing the separation with fortitude, and the one rendering his children fatherless rather than live insulted by some nameless and graceless youth.

David Inglis grew up in charge of the kind Uncle William, and endeared himself to his adopted father. He also was to fare to dominions beyond the sea, and he carried the name of Inglis to India, where he went in 1798 as writer to the East India Company.

Uncle William followed him with the usual good advice. In a letter he tells David he expects him to make a fortune in India that will give him ‘£3000 a year, that being the lowest sum on which it is possible to live in comfort.’

David’s life was a more adventurous one than that which usually falls to a writer. He went through the Mahratta War in 1803. He left India in 1812. On applying for a sick certificate, the resolution of Council, dated 1811, draws the attention of the Honourable Company to his services, ‘most particularly when selected to receive charge of the territorial cessions of the Peshwa under the Treaty of Bassein in the year 1803, displaying in the execution of that delicate and difficult mission, proofs of judgment and talents with moderation and firmness combined, which averted the necessity of having recourse to coercive measures, accomplished the peaceable transfer of a valuable territory, and conciliated those whose power and consequence were annihilated or abridged by the important change he so happily effected.’ David Inglis seems to have roamed through India, always seeking new worlds to conquer, and confident in his own powers to achieve.

One of the Napoleonic invasion scares alarmed the Company, and David, with two companions, was sent out on a cruising expedition to see if they could sight the enemy’s fleet. As long as he wrote from India, his letters bear the stamp of a man full of vital energy and resource.

The only thing he did not accomplish while in the service of the Company was the fortune of £3000 a year.

He entered a business firm in Bombay and there made enough to be able to keep a wife. In 1806 he married Martha Money, whose father was a partner in the firm. They came home in 1812, and all their younger children were born in England at Walthamstow, the home of the Money family. One of the descendants, who has read the letters of these three brothers and their families, makes this comment on them:—

‘The letters are pervaded with a sense of activity, and of wandering. Each one entering into any pursuit that came to hand. All the family were travellers. There are letters from aunts in Gibraltar and many other airts.

‘The extraordinary thing in all the letters, whether they were written by an Inglis, a Deas, or a Money, is the pervading note of strong religious faith. They not only refer to religion, but often, in truly Scottish fashion they enter on long theological dissertations. David Inglis, Elsie’s grandfather, when he was settled in England gave missionary addresses. Two of these exist, and must have taken fully an hour to read. Even the restless Alexander in Carolina, and the “whirlwind” David in India scarcely ever write a letter without a reference to some religious topic. You get the impression of strong breezy men sure of themselves, and finding the world a great playground.’

PART II
INDIA

‘God of our fathers, known of old.

.....

Beneath Whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine.’

John, the second youngest son of David and Martha Inglis, was born in 1820. His mother being English, there entered with her some of the douce Saxon disposition and ways. Though the call of the blood was to cast his lot in India, John, or as he was generally called David, appears first as a student. His tutor, the Rev. Dr. Niblock, wrote a report of him as he was passing out of his hands to Haileybury. Mrs. Inglis notes on the letter: ‘Dr. Niblock is esteemed one of the best Greek scholars in England, and his Greek Grammar is the one in use in Eton.’

‘Of Master David Inglis I can speak with pleasure and pride almost unmixed. I can only loudly express how I regret that I have not the finishing of such a boy, for I feel, and shall ever feel, that he is mine. He has long begun to do what few boys do till they are leaving, or have left, school, viz. to think. I shall long cherish the hope, that as I laid the foundation, so shall I have the power and pleasure of crowning my own and other’s labours. He will make a fine fellow and be a comfort to his parents, and an honour to his tutor.’

John Inglis received a nomination for Haileybury College from one of the directors of the East India Company, and went there as a student in 1839. There he was noted as a cricketer and a good horseman, and also for his reading. He knew Shakespeare almost by heart, and could tell where to find any quotation from his works. On leaving Haileybury he sailed for Calcutta, and was there for two years learning the language. He went as assistant magistrate to Agra. He married in 1846, and in 1847 he was transferred to the newly-acquired province of the Punjab. He was sent as magistrate to Sealkote, remaining there till 1856. He then brought his family home on three years’ furlough. With the outbreak of the Mutiny all civilians were recalled, and he returned to India in 1858. He was sent to Bareilly to take part in the suppression of the Mutiny, and was attached to the force under General Jones. He was present at the action at Najibabad, with the recapture of Bareilly, and the pacification of the province of Rohilcund. He remained in the province ten years till 1868, and during those years he rose to be Commissioner of Rohilcund. In 1868 he was made a member of the Board of Revenue in the North-West Provinces. As a member of the Legislative Council of India, he moved, in 1873, to Calcutta. From 1875 to 1877 he was Chief Commissioner of Oude.

The position Inglis made for himself in India, in yet early life, is to be gauged by a letter written in 1846 by Sir Frederick Currie, who was then Commissioner of Lahore. He had married Mrs. Inglis’ sister Katherine.

‘We have applied to Mr. Thomasen (Lieutenant-Governor of the N.W.P.) for young civilians for the work which is now before us, and we must take several with us into the Punjab. One whom he strongly recommends is Inglis at Agra. I will copy what he says about him. Sir Henry Hardinge (the Governor-General) has not seen the letter yet. “Another man who might suit you is Inglis at Agra; an assistant on £400, acting as joint magistrate which gives him one hundred more. Active, energetic, conciliating to natives, fine-tempered, and thoroughly honest in all his works. I am not sure that he is not as good a man as you can have. I shall be glad to hear that you send for him.”’

The letter was addressed to Inglis’ eighteen-year-old bride, and Sir Frederick goes on:—

‘Shall I send for him or not? I am almost sure I should have done so, had I not heard of your getting hold of his heart. We don’t want heartless men, but really you have no right to keep such a man from us. At the present moment, however, for your sake, little darling, I won’t take him from his present work, but if, after the honeymoon, he would prefer active and stirring employment, with the prospect of distinction, to the light-winged toys of feathered cupid, I dare say I shall be able to find an opening for him.’

Mr. Inglis’ wife was Harriet Louis Thompson, one of nine daughters. Her father was one of the first Indian civilians in the old company’s days. All of the nine sisters married men in the Indian Civil, with the exception of one who married an army officer. Harriet came out to her parents in India when she was seventeen, and she married in her eighteenth year. She must have been a girl of marked character and ability. She met her future husband at a dance in her father’s house, and she appears to have been the first to introduce the waltz into India. She was a fine rider, and often drove tandem in India. She must have had a steady nerve, for her letters are full of various adventures in camp and tiger-haunted jungles, and most of them narrate the presence of one of her infants who was accompanying the parents on their routine of Indian official life.

Her daughter says of her:—

‘She was deeply religious. Some years after their marriage, when she must have been a little over thirty and was alone in England with the six elder children, she started and ran most successfully a large working-men’s club in Southampton. Such a thing was not as common as it is to-day. There she lectured on Sunday evenings on religious subjects to the crowded hall of men.’

In the perfectly happy home of the Inglis family in India, the Indian ayah was one of the household in love and service to those she served. Mrs. Simson has supplied some memories of this faithful retainer:—

‘The early days, the nursery days in the life of a family, are always looked back upon with loving interest, and many of us can trace to them many sweet and helpful influences. So it was with our early days, though the nursery was in India, and the dear nurse who lives in our memories was an Indian. Her name was Sona (Gold). She came into our family when the eldest of us was born, and remained one of the household for more than thirty years. Her husband came with her, and in later years three of her sons were table servants. Sona came home with us in 1857, and remained in England till the beginning of 1858. It was a sign of great attachment to us, for she left her own family away up in the Punjab, and fared out in the long sea voyage, into a strange country and among new peoples. She made friends wherever she was, and her stay in England was a great help to her in after life. When I returned to India after my school life at home, I found the dear nurse of my childhood days installed again as nurse to the little sisters and brother I found there.

‘She was a sweet, gentle woman, and we never learnt anything but kind, gentle ways from her. By the time I returned she was recognised by the whole compound of servants as one to be looked up to and respected. She became a Christian and was baptized in 1877, but long before she made profession of her faith by baptism she lived a consistent Christian life. My dear mother’s influence was strong with her, and she was a reader of the Bible. One of my earliest recollections is our reading together the fourteenth chapter of St. John.

‘She died some years after we had all settled in Scotland. My parents left her, with a small pension for life, in charge of the missionaries at Lucknow. When she died, they wrote to us saying that old Sona had been one of the pillars of the Indian Christian Church in Lucknow.

‘We look forward with a sure and certain hope to our reunion in the home of many mansions, with her, around whom our hearts still cling with love and affection.’

In 1856 Mr. Inglis resolved to come home on furlough, accompanied by Mrs. Inglis, and what was called ‘the first family,’ namely, the six boys and one girl born to them in India. It was a formidable journey to accomplish even without children, and one writes, ‘How mother stood it all I cannot imagine.’ They came down from the Punjab to Calcutta trekking in dâk garris. It took four months to reach Calcutta by this means of progression, and another four months to come home by the Cape. The wonderful ayah, Sona, was a great help in the toilsome journey when they brought the children back to England. Mrs. Inglis was soon to have her first parting with her husband. When they landed in England, news of the outbreak of the Mutiny met them, and Mr. Inglis returned almost at once to take his place beside John Lawrence. Together they fought through the Mutiny, and then he worked under him. Inglis was one of John Lawrence’s men in the great settling of the Punjab which followed on that period of stress and strain in the Empire of India. His own district was Bareilly, and the house where he lived in Sealkote is still known as Inglis Sahib ke koti (Inglis Sahib’s house). His children remember the thrilling stories he used to tell them of these great days, and of the great men who made their history.

His admiration was unbounded for those northern races of India. He loved and respected them, and they, in their turn, gave him unbounded confidence and affection. ‘Every bit as good as an Englishman,’ was a phrase often on his lips when speaking of the fine Sikhs and Punjabis and Rajpoots.

Englishwomen were not allowed in India during this period, and Mrs. Inglis had to remain in Southampton with her six children and their ayah. It was then that she found work in her leisure time for the work she did in the Men’s Club.

In 1863, when life in India had resumed its normal course, Mrs. Inglis rejoined her husband, leaving the children she had brought back at home.

It must have taken all the ‘fortitude’ that Mary Deas had shown long before in Carolina to face this separation. There was no prospect of the running backwards and forwards, which steam was so soon to develop, and to draw the dominions into closer bonds. Letters took months to pass, and no cable carried the messages of life and death across ‘the white-lipped seas.’ Again, one of the survivors says: ‘I always felt even as a child, and am sure of it now, she left her heart behind with the six elder children. What it must have meant to a woman of her deep nature, I cannot imagine.’ The decision was made, and Mr. Inglis was to have the great reward of her return to him, after his seven years of strenuous and anxious loneliness. The boys were sent, three of them to Eton, and two more to Uppingham and to Rugby. Amy Inglis the daughter was left with friends. Relatives were not lacking in this large clan and its branches, and the children were ‘looked after’ by them. We owe much of our knowledge of ‘the second little family,’ which were to comfort the parents in India, by the correspondence concerning them with the dearly-loved children left in the homelands.

CHAPTER II
ELSIE MAUD INGLIS
1864–1917

‘Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward. As arrows are in the hand of the mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.’

Naini Tal, Aug. 16, 1864.

‘My darling Amy,—Thank God, I am able to tell you that your dearest mother, and your little sister who was born this morning are well. Aunt Ellen thinks that baby is very like your dearest mother, but I do not see the resemblance at present. I hope I may by and by. We could not form a better wish for her, than that she may grow up like her dear mother in every respect. Old Sona is quite delighted to have another baby to look after again. She took possession of her the moment she was born, as she has done with all of you. The nurse says she is a very strong and healthy baby. I wish to tell you as early as possible the good news of God’s great mercy and goodness towards us in having brought your dearest mother safely through this trial.’

Mrs. Inglis writes a long account of Elsie at a month old, and says she is supposed to have a temper, as she makes herself heard all over the house, and strongly objects to being brought indoors and put into her cradle.

In October she writes how the two babies, her own and Aunt Ellen’s little boy, had been taken to church to be baptized, the one by the name of Elsie Maude, the other Cyril Powney. Both children were thriving, and no one would know that there were two babies in the house. ‘Elsie always stares very hard at papa when he comes to speak to her, as if she did not quite know what to make of his black beard, something different to what she is accustomed to see, but she generally ends by laughing at him’—the first notice of that radiant friendship in which father and daughter were to journey together in a happy pilgrimage through life.

Elsie had early to make long driving expeditions with her parents, and her mother reports her as ‘accommodating herself to circumstances, watching the trees, sleeping under them, and the jolliest little traveller I ever saw.’

In December 1864 Mrs. Inglis reports their return from camp:—

‘It has been most extraordinarily warm for the time of year, and there has been very little rain during the whole twelvemonth. People attribute it to the wonderful comet which has been visible in the southern hemisphere. Elsie is very well, but she is a very little thing with a very wee face. She has a famous pair of large blue eyes, and it is quite remarkable how she looks about her and seems to observe everything. She lies in her bed at night in the dark and talks away out loud in her own little language, and little voice, and she is always ready for a laugh.’

Later on Mrs. Inglis writes: ‘I think she is one of the most intelligent babies I ever met with.’

Every letter descriptive of the dark, blue-eyed baby with the fast growing light hair, speaks of the smile ready for every one who speaks to her, and the hearty laughs which seem to have been one of her earliest characteristics.

One journey tried Elsie’s philosophy of taking life as she found it. Mrs. Inglis writes to her daughter:—

Naini Tal, 1865.

‘We came in palkies from Beharin to a place called Jeslie, half way up the hill to Naini Tal, and were about ten hours in the palkies. I had arranged to have Elsie with me in my palkie, but the little monkey did not like being away from Sona, and then the strangeness of the whole proceedings bewildered her, and the noise of the bearers seemed to frighten her, so I was obliged to make her over to Sona. She went to sleep after a little while. As we came near the hills it became cold and a wind got up, and then Papa brought her back to me, for we did not quite like her being in Sona’s doolie, which was not so well protected as mine. She had become more reconciled to the disagreeables of dâk travelling by that time. We reached our house about nine o’clock yesterday morning. The change from the dried-up hot plains is very pleasant. You may imagine how often I longed for the railroad and our civilised English way of travelling.’

Mrs. Shaw M‘Laren, the companion sister of Elsie, and to whom her correspondence always refers, has written down some memories of the happy childhood days in India. The year was divided between the plains and the hills of India. Elsie was born in August 1864, at Naini Tal, one of the most beautiful hill stations in the Himalayas. From the verandah, where much of the day was spent, the view was across the masses of ‘huddled hills’ to the ranges crowned by the everlasting snows. An outlook of silent and majestic stillness, and one which could not fail to influence such a spirit as shone out in the always wonderful eyes of Elsie. She grew up with the vision of the glory of the earthly dominion, and it gave a new meaning to the kingdom of the things of the spirit.

‘All our childhood is full of remembrances of “Father.” He never forgot our birthdays; however hot it was down in the scorched plains, when the day came round, if we were up in the hills, a large parcel would arrive from him. His very presence was joy and strength when he came to us at Naini Tal. What a remembrance there is of early walks and early breakfasts with him and the three of us. The table was spread in the verandah between six and seven. Father made three cups of cocoa, one for each of us, and then the glorious walk! Three ponies followed behind, each with their attendant grooms, and two or three red-coated chaprasis, father stopping all along the road to talk to every native who wished to speak to him, while we three ran about, laughing and interested in everything. Then, at night, the shouting for him after we were in bed and father’s step bounding up the stair in Calcutta, or coming along the matted floor of our hill home. All order and quietness flung to the winds while he said good night to us.

‘It was always understood that Elsie and he were special chums, but that never made any jealousy. Father was always just! The three cups of cocoa were exactly the same in quality and quantity. We got equal shares of his right and his left hand in our walks, but Elsie and he were comrades, inseparables from the day of her birth.

‘In the background of our lives there was always the quiet strong mother, whose eyes and smile live on through the years. Every morning before the breakfast and walk, there were five minutes when we sat in front of her in a row on little chairs in her room and read the scripture verses in turn, and then knelt in a straight, quiet row and repeated the prayers after her. Only once can I remember father being angry with any of us, and that was when one of us ventured to hesitate in instant obedience to some wish of hers. I still see the room in which it happened, and the thunder in his voice is with me still.’

Both Mr. and Mrs. Inglis belonged to the Anglican Church, though they never hesitated to go to any denomination where they found the best spiritual life. In later life in Edinburgh, they were connected with the Free Church of Scotland. To again quote from his daughter: ‘His religious outlook was magnificently broad and beautiful, and his belief in God simple and profound. His devotion to our mother is a thing impossible to speak about, but we all feel that in some intangible way it influenced and beautified our childhood.’

In 1870 Mrs. Inglis writes of the lessons of Elsie and her sister Eva. ‘The governess, Mrs. Marwood, is successful as a teacher; it comes easy enough to Elsie to learn, and she delights in stories being told her. Every morning after their early morning walk, and while their baths are being got ready, their mother says they come to her to say their prayers and learn their Bible lesson.’ There are two letters more or less composed by Elsie and written by her father. In as far as they were dictated by herself, they take stock of independent ways, and the spirit of the Pharisee is early developed in the courts of the Lord’s House, as she manages not to fall asleep all the time, while the weaker little sister slumbers and sleeps.

Eva, the sleepy sister, has some further reminiscences of these nursery days:—

‘We had forty dolls! Elsie decreed once that they should all have measles—so days were spent by us three painting little red dots all over the forty faces and the forty pairs of arms and legs. She was the doctor and prescribed gruesome drugs which we had to administer. Then it was decreed that they should slowly recover, so each day so many spots were washed off until the epidemic was wiped out!

‘Another time one of the forty dolls was lost! Maria was small and ugly, but much loved, and the search for her was tremendous, but unsuccessful. The younger sister gave it up. After all there were plenty other dolls—never mind Maria! But Elsie stuck to it. Maria must be found. Father would find her when he came home from Kutcherry in the evening, if nobody else could. So father was told with many tears of Maria’s disappearance. He agreed—Maria must be found. The next day all the enormous staff of Indian servants, numbering all told about thirty or so, were had up in a row and told that unless Maria was found sixpence would be cut from each servant’s pay for interminable months! What a search ensued! and Maria came to light within half an hour—in the pocket of one of the dresses of her little mistress found by one of the ayahs! Her mistress declared at the time, and always maintained with undiminished certainty, that she had first been put there, and then found by the ayah in question during that half-hour’s search!’

These reminiscences have more of interest than just the picture of the little child who was to carry on the early manifestations of a keen interest in life. A smile, surely one of the clouds of glory she trailed from heaven, and carried back untarnished by the tragedies of a stricken earth; they are chiefly valuable in the signs of a steadfast, independent will. The interest of all Elsie’s early development lay in the comradeship with a father whose wide benevolence and understanding love was to be the guide and helper in his daughter’s career. Not for the first time in the history of outstanding lives, the daughter has been the friend, and not the subjugated child of a selfish and dominant parent.

The date of Elsie’s birth was in the dawn of the movement which believed it possible that women could have a mind and a brain of their own, and that the freedom of the one and the cultivation of the other was not a menace to the possessive rights of the family, or the ruin of society at large. Thousands of women born at the same date were instructed that the aim of their lives must be to see to the creature comforts of their male parent, and when he was taken from them, to believe it right that he had neither educated them, nor made provision for the certain old age and spinsterdom which lay before the majority.

There have been many parents who gave their daughters no reason to call them blessed, when they were left alone unprovided with gear or education. In all periods of family history, such instances as Mr. Inglis’ outlook for his daughters is uncommon. He desired for them equal opportunities, and the best and highest education. He gave them the best of his mind, not its dregs, and a comradeship which made a rare and happy entrance for them into life’s daily toil and struggle. The father asked for nothing but their love, and he had his own unselfish devotion returned to him a hundredfold.

It must have been a great joy to him to watch the unfolding of talent and great gifts in this daughter who was always ‘his comrade.’ He could not live to see the end of a career so blessed, so rich in womanly grace and sustaining service, but he knew he had spared no good thing he could bring into her life, and when her mission was fulfilled, then, those who read and inwardly digest these pages will feel that she first learnt the secret of service to mankind in the home of her father.

CHAPTER III
THE LADDER OF LEARNING
1876–1885

‘Hast thou come with the heart of thy childhood back:

The free, the pure, the kind?

So murmured the trees in my homeward track,

As they played to the mountain wind.

‘Hath thy soul been true to its early love?

Whispered my native streams.

Hath the spirit nurs’d amid hill and grove,

Still revered its first high dream?’

After Mr. Inglis had been Chief Commissioner of Oude, he decided to retire from his long and arduous service. Had he been given the Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-West, as was expected by some in the service, he would probably have accepted it and remained longer in India. He was not in sympathy with Lord Lytton’s Afghan policy, and that would naturally alter his desire for further employment.

As with his father before him, his work was highly appreciated by those he served. Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, in a letter to Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, writes, February 1876:—

‘During the short period of my own official tenure I have met with much valuable assistance from Mr. Inglis, both as a member of my Legislative Council, and also as officiating Commissioner in Oudh, more especially as regards the amalgamation of Oudh with the N.W. Provinces. Of his character and abilities I have formed so high an opinion that had there been an available vacancy I should have been glad to secure to my government his continued services.’

Two of Mr. Inglis’ sons had settled in Tasmania, and it was decided to go there before bringing home the younger members of his family. The eldest daughter, Mrs. Simson, was now married and settled in Edinburgh, and the Inglis determined to make their home in that city.

Two years were spent in Hobart settling the two sons on the land. Mrs. M‘Laren says:—

‘When in Tasmania, Elsie and I went to a very good school. Miss Knott, the head-mistress, had come out from Cheltenham College for Girls. Here in the days when such things were practically unknown, Elsie, backed by Miss Knott, instituted ‘school colours.’ They were very primitive, not beautiful hatbands, but two inches of blue and white ribbon sewn on to a safety pin, and worn on the lapel of our coats. How proud we were of them.’

Mr. Inglis, writing to his daughter in Edinburgh, says of their school life:—

‘Elsie has done very well, she is in the second class and last week got up to second in the class.

‘We are all in a whirl having to sort and send off our boxes, some round the Cape, some to Melbourne, and some to go with us.’

Mrs. Inglis, on board the Durham homeward bound, writes:—

‘Elsie has found occupation for herself in helping to nurse sick children, and look after turbulent boys who trouble everybody on board, and a baby of seven months old is an especial favourite with her. Eva has met with a bosom friend in a little girl named Pearly Macmillan, without whom she would have collapsed altogether. Our vessel is not a fast one, but we have been only five instead of six weeks getting to Suez.’

The family took a house at 70 Bruntsfield Place, and the two girls were soon at school. Mrs. M‘Laren says:—

‘Elsie and I used to go daily to the Charlotte Square Institution, which used in those days to be the Edinburgh school for girls. Mr. Oliphant was headmaster. Father never approved of the Scotch custom of children walking long distances to school, and we used to be sent every morning in a cab. The other day, when telling the story of the S.W.H.’s to a large audience of working women in Edinburgh, one woman said to me, “My husband is a prood man the day! He tells everybody how he used to drive Dr. Inglis to school every morning when she was a girl.”’

Of her school life in Edinburgh, Miss Wright gives these memories:—

‘I remember quite distinctly when the girls of 23 Charlotte Square were told that two girls from Tasmania were coming to the school, and a certain feeling of surprise that the said girls were just like ordinary mortals, though the big, earnest brows and the quaint hair parted in the middle and done up in plaits fastened up at the back of the head were certainly not ordinary. Elsie was put in a higher English class than I was in, and though I knew her, I did not know her very well.

‘A friend has a story of a question going round the class, she thinks Clive or Warren Hastings was the subject of the lesson, and the question was what one would do if a calumny were spread about one. “Deny it,” one girl answered. “Fight it,” another. Still the teacher went on asking. “Live it down,” said Elsie. “Right, Miss Inglis.” My friend writes, “The question I cannot remember, it was the bright confident smile with the answer, and Mr. Hossack’s delighted wave to the top of the class that abides in my memory.”

‘I always think a very characteristic story of Elsie is her asking that the school might have permission to play in Charlotte Square gardens. In those days no one thought of providing fresh air exercise for girls except by walks, and tennis was just coming in. Elsie had the courage (to us schoolgirls it seemed the extraordinary courage) to confront the three directors of the school and ask if we might be allowed to play in the gardens of the Square. The three directors together were to us the most formidable and awe-inspiring body, though separately they were amiable and estimable men!

‘The answer was we might play in the gardens if the neighbouring proprietors would give their consent, and the heroic Elsie, with I think one other girl, actually went round to each house in the Square and asked consent of the owner.

‘In those days the inhabitants of Charlotte Square were very select and exclusive indeed, and we all felt it was a brave thing to do. Elsie gained her point, and the girls played at certain hours in the Square till a regular playing field was arranged.’

Her sister Eva reports that the first answer of the directors was enough for the rest of the school. But Elsie, undaunted, interviewed each of the three directors herself. After every bell in Charlotte Square had been rung and all interviewed, she returned from this great expedition triumphant. All had consented, so the damsels interned from nine to three were given the gardens, and the grim, dull, palisaded square must have suddenly been made to blossom like the rose. Would that some follower of Elsie Inglis even now might ring the door bells and get the gates unlocked to the rising generation. Elsie’s companion or companions in this first attempt to influence those in authority have been spoken of as ‘her first unit.’

Elsie was, for a time, joint editor of the Edina, a school magazine of the ordinary type. Her great achievement was in making it pay, which, it is recorded, no other editor was able to do. There are various editorial anxieties alluded to in her correspondence with her father. The memories quoted take us further than school days, but they find a fitting place here.

‘Our more intimate acquaintance came after Mrs. Inglis’ death and when Elsie was thinking of and beginning her medical work. In 1888 six of us girls who had been at the same school started the “Six Sincere Students Society,” which met in one house. The first year we read and discussed Emerson’s Essays on “Self-Reliance and Heroism.” I am pretty sure it was Elsie who suggested those Essays. Also, Helps, and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. I have a note on this “two very hot discussions as to what Culture means, and if it is sufficiently powerful to regenerate the world. Culture of the masses and also of women largely gone into.”

‘This very friendly and happy society lasted on till 1891, when it was enlarged and became a Debating Society. I find Elsie taking up such subjects as “That our modern civilisation is a development not a degeneration.” “That character is formed in a busy life rather than in solitude.” Papers on Henry Drummond’s Ascent of Man, and on the “Ethics of War.”

‘Always associated with Elsie in those days I think of her father, and no biography of her will be true which does not emphasise the beautiful and deep love and sympathy between Elsie and Mr. Inglis. He used to meet us girls as if we were his intellectual equals, and would discuss problems and answer our questions with the utmost cordiality and appreciation of our point of view, and always there was the feeling of the entire understanding and fellowship between father and daughter.

‘She was a keen croquet player, and tolerated no frivolity when a stroke either at croquet or golf were in the balance. She was fond of long walks with Mr. Inglis, and then by herself, and time never hung on her hands in holiday time, she was always serene and happy.’

It was decided that Elsie should go to school in Paris in September 1882—a decision not lightly made; and Mr. Inglis writes after her departure:—

‘I do not think I could have borne to part with you, my darling, did I not feel the assurance that in doing so we are following the Lord’s guidance. Your dear mother and I both made it the subject of earnest prayer, and I feel we have been guided to do what was best for you; and we shall see this when the weary time is over, and we have got you back again with us.

‘When I return to Edinburgh, I feel that I shall have no one to find out my Psalms for me, or to cut my Spectator, that we shall have no more discussions regarding the essays of Mr. Fraser, and no more anxieties about the forthcoming number of the Edina. The nine months will pass quickly.’

Elsie’s letters from Paris have not been preserved, but the ones from her father show the alert intelligence and interest in all she was reporting. Of the events at home and abroad, Mr. Inglis writes to her of the Suez Canal, the bringing to justice of the Phœnix Park murderers, the great snowstorm at home, and the Channel Tunnel. Mrs. Inglis writes with maternal scepticism on some passing events: ‘I cannot imagine you making the body of your dress. I think there would not be many carnivals if you had to make the dresses yourselves.’ Mr. Inglis, equally sceptical, has a more satisfactory solution for dressmaking. ‘I hope you have more than one dinner frock, two or three, and let them be pretty ones.’ Mrs. Inglis, commenting on Elsie’s description of Gambetta’s funeral, says: ‘He is a loss to France. Poor France, she always seems to me like a vessel without a helm driven about just where the winds take it. She has no sound Christian principle to guide her. So different from our highly favoured England.’

Mr. Inglis’ letters are full of the courteous consideration for Elsie and for others which marked all the way of his life, and made him the man greatly beloved, in whatever sphere he moved. Punch and the Spectator went from him every week, and he writes: ‘I hope there was nothing in that number of Punch you gave M. Survelle to study while you were finishing your breakfast to hurt his feelings as a Frenchman. Punch has not been very complimentary to them of late.’ And when Elsie’s sense of humour had been moved by a saying of her gouvernante, Mr. Inglis writes, desirous of a very free correspondence with home, but—

‘I fear if I send your letter to Eva, at school, that your remark about Miss —— proposal to go down to the lower flat of your house, because the Earl of Anglesea once lived there, may be repeated and ultimately reach her with exaggerations, as those things always do, and may cause unpleasant feelings.’

There must have been some exhibition of British independence, and in dealing with it Mr. Inglis reminds Elsie of a day in India ‘when you went off for a walk by yourself, and we all thought you were lost, and all the Thampanies and chaprasies and everybody were searching for you all over the hill.’ One later episode was not on a hillside, and except for les demoiselles in Paris, equally harmless.

‘Jan. 1883.

‘I can quite sympathise with you, my darling, in the annoyance you feel at not having told Miss Brown of your having walked home part of the way from Madame M—— last Wednesday. It would have been far better if you had told her, as you wished to do, what had happened. Concealment is always wrong, and very often turns what was originally only a trifle into a serious matter. In this case, I don’t suppose Miss B. could have said much if you had told her, though she may be seriously angry if it comes to her knowledge hereafter. If she does hear of it, you had better tell her that you told me all about it, and that I advised you, under the circumstances, as you had not told her at the time, and that as by doing so now you could only get the others into trouble, not to say anything about it; but keep clear of these things for the future, my darling.’

When the end came here, in this life, one of her school-fellows wrote:—

‘Elsie has been and is such a world-wide inspiration to all who knew her. One more can testify to the blessedness of her friendship. Ever since the Paris days of ’83 her strong loving help was ready in difficult times, and such wonderfully strengthening comfort in sorrow.’

The Paris education ended in the summer of 1883, and Miss Brown, who conducted and lived with the seven girls who went out with her from England, writes after their departure:—

‘I cannot tell you how much I felt when you all disappeared, and how sad it was to go back to look at your deserted places. I cannot at all realise that you are now all separated, and that we may never meet again on earth. May we meet often at the throne of grace, and remember each other there. It is nice to have a French maid to keep up the conversations, and if you will read French aloud, even to yourself, it is of use.’

Paris was, no doubt, an education in itself, but the perennial hope of fond parents that languages and music are in the air of the continent, were once again disappointed in Elsie. She was timber-tuned in ear and tongue, and though she would always say her mind in any vehicle for thought, the accent and the grammar strayed along truly British lines. Her eldest niece supplies a note on her music:—

‘She was still a schoolgirl when they returned from Tasmania. At that time she was learning music at school. I thought her a wonderful performer on the piano, but afterwards her musical capabilities became a family joke which no one enjoyed more than herself. She had two “pieces” which she could play by heart, of the regular arpeggio drawing-room style, and these always had to be performed at any family function as one of the standing entertainments.’

Elsie returned from Paris, the days of the schoolgirlhood left behind. Her character was formed, and she had the sense of latent powers. She had not been long at home when her mother died of a virulent attack of scarlet fever, and Mr. Inglis lost the lodestar of his loving nature. ‘From that day Elsie shouldered all father’s burdens, and they two went on together until his death.’

In her desk, when it was opened, these ‘Resolutions’ were found. They are written in pencil, and belong to the date when she became the stay and comfort of her father’s remaining years:—

‘I must give up dreaming,—making stories.

‘I must give up getting cross.

‘I must devote my mind more to the housekeeping.

‘I must be more thorough in everything.

‘I must be truthful.

‘The bottom of the whole evil is the habit of dreaming, which must be given up. So help me, God.

‘Elsie Inglis.’

CHAPTER IV
THE STUDENT DAYS
1885–1892
EDINBURGH—GLASGOW

‘Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.’

‘I remember well the day Elsie came in and, sitting down beside father, divulged her plan of “going in for medicine.” I still see and hear him, taking it all so perfectly calmly and naturally, and setting to work at once to overcome the difficulties which were in the way, for even then all was not plain sailing for the woman who desired to study medicine.’ So writes Mrs. M‘Laren, looking back on the days when the future doctor recognised her vocation and ministry. If it had been a profession of ‘plain sailing,’ the adventurous spirit would probably not have embarked in that particular vessel. The seas had only just been charted, and not every shoal had been marked. In the midst of them Elsie’s bark was to have its hairbreadth escapes. The University Commission decided that women should not be excluded any longer from receiving degrees owing to their sex. The writer recollects the description given of the discussion by the late Sir Arthur Mitchell, K.C.B., one of the most enlightened minds of the age in which he lived and achieved so much. He, and one or more of his colleagues, presented the Commissioners with the following problem: ‘Why not? On what theory or doctrine was it just or beneficent to exclude women from University degrees?’ There came no answer, for logic cannot be altogether ignored by a University Commission, so, without opposition or blare of trumpets, the Scottish Universities opened their degrees to all students. It was of good omen that the Commission sat in high Dunedin, under that rock bastion where Margaret, saint and queen, was the most learned member of the Scottish nation in the age in which she reigned.

Dr. Jex Blake had founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, and it was there that Elsie received her first medical teaching. Everything was still in its initial stages, and every step in the higher education of women had to be fought and won, against the forces of obscurantism and professional jealousy.

University Commissions might issue reports, but the working out of them was left in the hands of men who were determined to exclude women from the medical profession.

Clinical teaching could only be carried on in a few hospitals. Anatomy was learnt under the most discouraging circumstances. Mixed classes were, and still are, refused. Extra-mural teaching became complicated, on the one hand, by the extra fees which were wrung from women students, and by the careless and perfunctory teaching accorded by the twice-paid profession. Professors gave the off-scourings of their minds, the least valuable of their subjects, and their unpunctual attendance to all that stood for female students. It will hardly be believed that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh refused to admit women to clinical teaching in the wards, until they had raised seven hundred pounds to furnish two wards in which, and in which alone, they might work. To these two wards, with their selected cases, they are still confined, with the exception of one or two other less important subjects. Medicals rarely belong to the moneyed classes, and very few women can command the money demanded of the medical course, and that women should have raised at once the tax thus put upon them by the Royal Infirmary is an illustration of how keenly and bravely they fought through all the disabilities laid upon them.

Women had always staunch friends among the doctors. The names of many of them are written in gold in the story of the opening of the profession to women. It has been observed that St. Paul had the note of all great minds, a passion to share his knowledge of a great salvation, with both Jews and Gentiles. That test of greatness was not conspicuous in the majority of the medical profession at the time when Elsie Inglis came as a learner to the gates of medical science. That kingdom, like most others, had to suffer violence ere she was to be known as the good physician in her native city and in those of the allied nations.

There are no letters extant from Elsie concerning her time with Dr. Jex Blake. After Mrs. Inglis’ death, Mr. Inglis decided to leave their home at Bruntsfield, and the family moved to rooms in Melville Street. Here Elsie was with her father, and carried on her studies from his house. It was not an altogether happy start, and very soon she had occasion to differ profoundly with Dr. Jex Blake in her management of the school. Two of the students failed to observe the discipline imposed by Dr. Jex Blake, and she expelled them from the school. Any high-handed act of injustice always roused Elsie to keen and concentrated resistance. A lawsuit was brought against Dr. Jex Blake, and it was successful, proving in its course that the treatment of the students had been without justification.

Looking back on this period of the difficult task of opening the higher education to women, it is easy to see the defects of many of those engaged in the struggle. The attitude towards women was so intolerably unjust that many of the pioneers became embittered in soul, and had in their bearing to friends or opponents an air which was often provocative of misunderstanding. They did not always receive from the younger generation for whom they had fought that forbearance that must be always extended to ‘the old guard,’ whose scars and defects are but the blemishes of a hardly-contested battle. Success often makes people autocratic, and those who benefit from the success, and suffer under the overbearing spirit engendered, forget their great gains in the galling sensation of being ridden over rough-shod. It is an episode on which it is now unnecessary to dwell, and Dr. Inglis would always have been the first to render homage to the great pioneer work of Dr. Jex Blake.

Through it all Elsie was living in the presence chamber of her father’s chivalrous, high-minded outlook. Whatever action she took then, must have had his approval, and it was from him that she received that keen sense of equal justice for all.

These student years threw them more than ever together. On Sundays they worshipped in the morning in Free St. George’s Church, and in the evening in the Episcopal Cathedral. Mr. Inglis was a great walker, and Elsie said, ‘I learnt to walk when I used to take those long walks with father, after mother died.’ Then she would explain how you should walk. ‘Your whole body should go into it, and not just your feet.’

Of these student days her niece, Evelyn Simson, says:—

‘When she was about eighteen she began to wear a bonnet on Sunday. She was the last girl in our connection to wear one. My Aunt Eva who is two years younger never did, so I think the fashion must have changed just then. I remember thinking how very grown up she must be.’

Another niece writes:—

‘At the time when it became the fashion for girls to wear their hair short, when she went out one day, and came home with a closely-cropped head, I bitterly resented the loss of Aunt Elsie’s beautiful shining fair hair, which had been a real glory to her face. She herself was most delighted with the new style, especially with the saving of trouble in hairdressing.

‘She only allowed her hair to grow long again because she thought it was better for a woman doctor to dress well and as becomingly as possible. This opinion only grew as she became older, and had been longer in the profession; in her student days she rather prided herself on not caring about personal appearance, and she dressed very badly.

‘Her sense of fairplay was very strong. Once in college there was an opposition aroused to the Student Christian Union, and a report was spread that the students belonging to it were neglecting their college work. It happened to be the time for the class examinations, and the lists were posted on the College notice-board. The next morning, the initials C.U. were found printed opposite the names of all the students who belonged to the Christian Union, and, as these happened to head the list in most instances, the unfair report was effectually silenced. No one knew who had initialed the list; it was some time afterwards I discovered it had been Aunt Elsie.

‘She was a beautiful needlewoman. She embroidered and made entirely herself two lovely little flannel garments for her first grand-nephew, in the midst of her busy life, then filled to overflowing with the work of her growing practice, and of her suffrage activities.

‘The babies as they arrived in the families met with her special love. In her short summer holidays with any of us, the children were her great delight.

‘She was a great believer in an open-air life. One summer she took three of us a short walking tour from Callander, and we did enjoy it. We tramped over the hills, and finally arrived at Crianlarich, only to find the hotel crammed and no sleeping accommodation. She would take no refusal, and persuaded the manager to let us sleep on mattresses in the drawing-room, which added to the adventures of our trip.

‘On the way she entertained us with tales of her college life, and imbued us with our first enthusiasm for the women’s cause.

‘When I myself began to study medicine, no one could have been more enthusiastically encouraging, and even through the stormy and somewhat depressing times of the early career of the Medical College for Women, Edinburgh, her faith and vision never faltered, and she helped us all to hold on courageously.’

In 1891 Elsie went to Glasgow to take the examination for the Triple Qualification at the Medical School there. She could not then take surgery in Edinburgh, and the facilities for clinical teaching were all more favourable in Glasgow.

It was probably better for her to be away from all the difficulties connected with the opening of the second School of Medicine for Women in Edinburgh. The one founded by Dr. Jex Blake was the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, and the one promoted by Elsie Inglis and other women students was known as the Medical College for Women. ‘It was with the fortunes of this school that she was more closely associated,’ writes Dr. Beatrice Russell.

In Glasgow she resided at the Y.W.C.A. Hostel. Her father did not wish her to live alone in lodgings, and she accommodated herself very willingly to the conditions under which she had to live. Miss Grant, the superintendent, became her warm friend. Elsie’s absence from home enabled her to give a vivid picture of her life in her daily letters to her father.

‘Glasgow, Feb. 4, 1891.

‘It was not nice seeing you go off and being left all alone. After I have finished this letter I am going to set to work. It seems there are twelve or fourteen girls boarding here, and there are regular rules. Miss Grant told me if I did not like some of them to speak to her, but I am not going to be such a goose as that. One rule is you are to make your own bed, which she did not think I could do! But I said I could make it beautifully. I would much rather do what all the others do. Well, I arranged my room, and it is as neat as a new pin. Then we walked up to the hospital, to the dispensary; we were there till 4.30, as there were thirty-six patients, and thirty-one of them new.

‘I am most comfortable here, and I am going to work like anything. I told Miss Barclay so, and she said, “Oh goodness, we shall all have to look out for our laurels!”’

‘Feb. 7, ’91.

‘Mary Sinclair says it is no good going to the dispensaries on Saturday, as there are no students there, and the doctors don’t take the trouble to teach. I went to Dr. MacEwan’s wards this morning. I was the first there, so he let me help him with an operation; then I went over to Dr. Anderson’s.

‘Feb. 9.

‘This morning I spent the whole time in Dr. MacEwan’s wards. He put me through my facings. I could not think what he meant, he asked me so many questions. It seems it is his way of greeting a new student. Some of them cannot bear him, but I think he is really nice, though he can be abominably sarcastic, and he is a first-rate surgeon and capital teacher.

‘To-day, it was the medical jurists and the police officers he was down on, and he told story after story of how they work by red tape, according to the text-books. He said that, while he was casualty surgeon, one police officer said to him that it was no good having him there, for he never would try to make the medical evidence fit in with the evidence they had collected. Once they brought in a woman stabbed in her wrist, and said they had caught the man who had done it running away, and he had a knife. Dr. MacEwan said the cut had been done by glass and not by a knife, so they could not convict the man, and there was an awful row over it. Some of them went down to the alley where it had happened, and sure enough there was a pane of glass smashed right through the centre. When the woman knew she was found out, she confessed she had done it herself. The moral he impressed on us was to examine your patient before you hear the story.

‘A. is beginning to get headaches and not sleep at night. I am thankful to say that is not one of my tricks. Miss G. is getting unhappy about her, and is going to send up beef-tea every evening. She offered me some, but I like my glass of milk much better. I am taking my tonic and my tramp regularly, so I ought to keep well. I am quite disgusted when girls break down through working too hard. They must remember they are not as strong as men, and then they do idiotic things, such as taking no exercise, into the bargain.

‘Dr. MacEwan asked us to-day to get the first stray £20,000 we could for him, as he wants to build a proper private hospital. So I said he should have the second £20,000 I came across, as I wanted the first to build and endow a woman’s College in Edinburgh. He said he thought that would be great waste; there should not be separate colleges. “If women are going to be doctors, equal with the men, they should go to the same school.” I said I quite agreed with him, but when they won’t admit you, what are you to do? “Leave them alone,” he said; “they will admit you in time,” and he thought outside colleges would only delay that.

‘This morning in Dr. MacEwan’s wards a very curious case came in. Some of us tried to draw it, never thinking he would see us, and suddenly he swooped round and insisted on seeing every one of the scribbles. He has eyes, I believe, in the back of his head and ears everywhere. He forgot, I thought, to have the ligature taken off a leg he was operating on, and I said so in the lowest whisper to M. S. About five minutes afterwards, he calmly looked straight over to us, and said, “Now, we’ll take off the ligature!”

‘I went round this morning and saw a few of my patients. I found one woman up who ought to have been in bed. I discovered she had been up all night because her husband came in tipsy about eleven o’clock. He was lying there asleep on the bed. I think he ought to have been horse-whipped, and when I have the vote I shall vote that all men who turn their wives and families out of doors at eleven o’clock at night, especially when the wife is ill, shall be horse-whipped. And, if they make the excuse that they were tipsy, I should give them double. They would very soon learn to behave themselves.

‘As to the father of the cherubs you ask about, his family does not seem to lie very heavily on his mind. He is not in work just now, and apparently is very often out of work. One cannot take things seriously in that house.

‘In the house over the Clyde I saw the funniest sight. It is an Irish house, as dirty as a pig-sty, and there are about ten children. When I got there, at least six of the children were in the room, and half of them without a particle of clothing. They were sitting about on the table and on the floor like little cherubs with black faces. I burst out laughing when I saw them, and they all joined in most heartily, including the mother, though not one of them saw the joke, for they came and stood just as they were round me in a ring to see the baby washed. Suddenly, the cherubs began to disappear and ragged children to appear instead. I looked round to see who was dressing them, but there was no one there. They just slipped on their little black frocks, without a thing on underneath, and departed to the street as soon as the baby was washed.

‘Three women with broken legs have come in. I don’t believe so many women have ever broken their legs together in one day before! One of them is a shirt finisher. She sews on the buttons and puts in the gores at the rate of 4½d. a dozen shirts. We know the shop, and they sell the shirts at 4s. 6d. each. Of course, political economy is quite true, but I hope that shopkeeper, if ever he comes back to this earth, will be a woman and have to finish shirts at 4½d. a dozen, and then he’ll see the other side of the question. I told the woman it was her own fault for taking such small wages, at which she seemed amused. It is funny the stimulating effect a big school has on a hospital. The Royal here is nearly as big and quite as rich as the Edinburgh Royal, but there is no pretence that they really are in their teaching and arrangements the third hospital in the kingdom, as they are in size. The London Hospital is the biggest, and then comes Edinburgh, and this is the third. Guy’s and Bart.’s, that one hears so much about, are quite small in comparison, but they have big medical schools attached. The doctors seem to lie on their oars if they don’t have to teach.

‘Feb. 1892.

‘I thought the Emperor of Germany’s speech the most impertinent piece of self-glorification I ever met with. Steed’s egotism is perfect humility beside it. He and his house are the chosen instruments of “our supreme Lord,” and anybody who does not approve of what he does had better clear out of Germany. As you say, Makomet and Luther and all the great epoch-makers had a great belief in themselves and their mission, but the German Emperor will have to give some further proof of his divine commission (beyond a supreme belief in himself) before I, for one, will give in my submission. I never read such a speech. I think it was perfectly blasphemous.

‘The Herald has an article about wild women. It evidently thinks St. Andrews has opened the flood-gates, and now there is the deluge. St. Andrews has done very well—degrees and mixed classes from next October. Don’t you think our Court might send a memorial to the University Court about medical degrees? It is splendid having Sir William Muir on our side, and I believe the bulk of the Senators are all right—they only want a little shove.’

In Glasgow the women students had to encounter the opposition to ‘mixed classes,’ and the fight centred in the Infirmary. It would have been more honest to have promulgated the decision of the Managers before the women students had paid their fees for the full course of medical tuition.

Elsie, in her letters, describes the toughly fought contest, and the final victory won by the help of the just and enlightened leaders in the medical world. ‘So here is another fight,’ writes the student, with a sigh of only a half regret! It was too good a fight, and the backers were too strong for the women students not to win their undoubted rights. Through all the chaffing and laughter, one perceives the thread of a resolute purpose, and Elsie’s great gift, the unconquerable facing of ‘the Hill Difficulty.’ True, the baffled and puzzled enemy often played into their hands, as when Dr. T., driven to extremity in a weak moment, threatened to prevent their attendance by ‘physical force.’ The threat armed the students with yet another legal grievance. Elsie describes on one occasion in her haste going into a ward where Dr. Gemmel, one of the ‘mixed’ objectors, was demonstrating. She perceived her mistake, and retreated, not before receiving a smile from her enemy. The now Sir William MacEwan enjoyed the fight quite as much as his women students; and if to-day he notes the achievements of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, he may count as his own some of their success in the profession in which he has achieved so worthy a name. The dispute went on until at length an exhausted foe laid down its weapons, and the redoubtable Dr. T. conveyed the intimation that the women students might go to any of the classes—and a benison on them!

The faction fight, like many another in the brave days of old, roared and clattered down the paved causeways of Glasgow. Dr. T., in his gate-house, must have wished his petticoat foes many times away and above the pass. If he, or any of the obstructionists of that day survive, we know that they belong to a sect that needs no repentance. They may, however, note with self-complacency that their action trained on a generation skilled in the contest of fighting for democratic rights in the realm of knowledge. It is a birthright to enter into that gateway, and the keys are given to all who possess the understanding mind and reverent attitude towards all truth.

‘Nov. 1891.

‘Those old wretches, the Infirmary Managers, have reared their heads again, and now have decided that we are not to go to mixed classes, and we have been tearing all over the wards seeing all sorts of people about it. I went to Dr. K.’s this morning—all right. Crossing the quadrangle, a porter rushed at me and said, “Dr. T. wants to see all the lady students at the gate-house.” I remarked to Miss M., “I am certainly not going to trot after Dr. T. for casual messages like that. He can put up a notice if he wants me.” We were going upstairs to Dr. R. when another porter ran up and said, “Dr. T. is in his office. He would be much obliged if you would speak to him.” So we laughed, and said that was more polite anyhow, and went into the office. So he hummed and hawed, looked everywhere except at us, and then said the Infirmary Managers said we were not to go to mixed classes. So I promptly said, “Then I shall come for my fees to-morrow,” and walked out of the room. I was angry. I went straight back to Dr. K., who said he was awfuly sorry and angry, and he would see Dr. T., but he was afraid he could do nothing.

‘So here is another fight. But you see we cannot be beat here, for the same reason that we cannot beat them in Edinburgh. Were the managers, managers a hundred times over, they cannot turn Mr. MacEwan off.

‘The Glasgow Herald had an article the other day, saying there was a radical change in the country, and that no one was taking any notice of it, and no one knew where it was to land us. This was the draft ordinance of the Commissioners which actually put the education of women on the same footing as that of men, and, worse still, seemed to countenance mixed classes. The G. H. seems to think this is the beginning of the end, and will necessarily lead to woman’s suffrage, and it will probably land them in the pulpit; because if they are ordinary University students they may compete for any of the bursaries, and many bursaries can only be held on condition that the holder means to enter the Church! You never read such an article, and it was not the least a joke but sober earnest.

‘I saw Dr. P. about my surgery. The chief reason I tried to get that prize was to pay for those things and not worry you about them. I want to pass awfully well, as it tells all one’s life through, and I mean to be very successful!

‘Dr. B. has the most absurd way of agreeing with everything you say. He asked me what I would do with a finger. I thought it was past all mending and said, “Amputate it.” “Quite so, quite so,” he said solemnly, “but we’ll dress it to-day with such and such a thing.” There were two or three other cases in which I recommended desperate measures, in which he agreed, but did not follow. Finally, he asked Mr. B. what he would do with a swelling. Mr. B. hesitated. I said, “Open it.” Whereupon he went off into fits of laughter, and proclaimed to the whole room my prescriptions, and said I would make a first-rate surgeon for I was afraid of nothing.

‘It is one thing to recommend treatment to another person and another to do it yourself.

‘Queen Margaret is to be taken into the University, not affiliated, but made an integral part of the University and the lecturers appointed again by the Senators. That means that the Glasgow degrees in everything are to be given from October, Arts, Medicine, Science, and Theology. The “decrees of the primordial protoplasm,” that Sir James Crichton-Browne knows all about, are being reversed right and left, and not only by the Senatus Academicus of St. Andrews!’

The remaining letters are filled with all the hopes and fears of the examined. Mr. MacEwan tells her she will pass ‘with one hand,’ and Elsie has the usual moan over a defective memory, and the certainties that she will be asked all the questions to which she has no answering key. The evidences of hard and conscientious study abound, and, after she had counted the days and rejoined her father, she found she had passed through the heavy ordeal with great success, and, having thus qualified, could pass on to yet unconquered realms of experience and service.

CHAPTER V
LONDON
THE NEW HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN
DUBLIN
THE ROTUNDA
1892–1894

‘We take up the task eternal and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers, O Pioneers.’—Walt Whitman.

After completing her clinical work in Glasgow, and passing the examination for the Triple Qualification in 1892, it was decided that Elsie should go to London and work as house-surgeon in the new Hospital for Women in the Euston Road. In 1916 that hospital kept its jubilee year, and when Elsie went to work there it had been established for nearly thirty years. Its story contains the record of the leading names among women doctors. In the commemorative prayer of Bishop Paget, an especial thanksgiving was made ‘for the good example of those now at rest, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Sophia Jex Blake, of good work done by women doctors throughout the whole world, and now especially of the high trust and great responsibility committed to women doctors in this hour of need.’ The hearts of many present went over the washing seas, to the lands wasted by fire and sword, and to the leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, who had gained her earliest surgical experience in the wards of the first hospital founded by the first woman doctor, and standing for the new principle that women can practise the healing art.

Elsie Inglis took up her work with keen energy and a happy power of combining work with varied interests. In the active months of her residence she resolutely ‘tramped’ London, attended most of the outstanding churches, and was a great sermon taster of ministers ranging from Boyd Carpenter to Father Maturin. Innumerable relatives and friends tempted her to lawn tennis and the theatres. She had a keen eye to all the humours of the staff, and formed her own opinions on patients and doctors with her usual independence of judgment.

Elsie’s letters to her father were detailed and written daily. Only a very small selection can be quoted, but every one of them is instinct with a buoyant outlook, and they are full of the joy of service.

It is interesting to read in these letters her descriptions of the work of Dr. Garrett Anderson, and then to read Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson’s speech on her mother at the jubilee of the hospital. ‘I shall never forget her at Victoria Station on the day when the Women’s Hospital Corps was leaving England for France, early in September 1914. She was quite an old woman, her life’s work done, but the light of battle was in her eyes, and she said, “Had I been twenty years younger I would have been taking you myself.” Just twenty-one years before the war broke down the last of the barriers against women’s work as doctors, Elsie Inglis entered the New Hospital for Women, to learn with that staff of women doctors who had achieved so much under conditions so full of difficulties and discouragements.

‘New Hospital for Women,
‘Euston Rd., 1892–3.

‘My own dearest Papa,—Here we begin another long series of letters. The people in the carriage were very quiet, so I slept all right. Of course they shut up all the windows, so I opened all the ventilators, and I also opened the window two or three times. I had breakfast at once, and then a bath, and then came in for a big operation by Mrs. Boyd. Her husband came up to help her. Mrs. Scharlieb and Mrs. de la Cherois were up too—both of them visiting doctors. I have been all round the wards and got a sort of idea of the cases in my head, but I shall have to get them all up properly. The visiting physicians seem to call all over the day, from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon. Some of the students from the School of Medicine are dressers and clerks. I believe I have to drill them, but of course they are only very senior students, because their real hospital is the Royal Free. There are four wards, two of them round, with two fireplaces back to back in the middle. The other two wards are oblong, and they are all prettily painted, and bright. Then there are two small wards for serious cases. I have not arranged my room yet, as I have not had a minute. I am going out to post this and get a stethescope. Mrs. de la Cherois has been here; she is a nice old lady, and awfully particular. I would much rather work with people like that than people who are anyhow. Mrs. Scharlieb is about forty, very dark and solemn. The nurses seem nice, but they don’t have any special uniform, which I think is a pity; so they are pinks and greys and blues, and twenty different patterns of caps. I think I shall like being here very much. I only hope I shall get on with all my mistresses! And, I hope I shall always remember what to do.

‘The last big operation case died. It was very sad, and very provoking, for she really was doing well, but she had not vitality enough to stand the shock. That was the case whose doctor told her and her husband that she was suffering from hysteria. And that man, you know, can be a fellow of the colleges, and member of any society he likes to apply to, while Mrs. G. Anderson and Mrs. Scharlieb cannot! Is it not ridiculous?

‘Mrs. G. Anderson said she was going to speak to Mrs. M‘Call about my having one of her maternity posts. I shall come home first, however, my own dearest Papa. Mrs. G. A. said she thought I should have a good deal more of that kind of work if I was going to set up in a lonely place like Edinburgh, as I ought never to have to call in a man to help me out of a hole!

‘Mrs. G. Anderson is going to take me to a Cinderella dance to-night in aid of the hospital. I am to meet her at St. James’ Hall. We had an awful morning of it. Mrs. G. A. is taking Mrs. M.’s ward, and turned up 9.30, Mrs. S.’s hour. Then Miss C. came in on the top to consult about two of her cases. Into the bargain, A. slept late, and did not arrive till near ten, so, by the time they had all left, I had a lovely medley of treatment in my head. My fan has arrived, and will come in for to-night. I hope Mrs. G. Anderson will be a nice chaperone and introduce one properly. I am to go early, and her son is to look out for me, and begin the introducing till she comes. Miss Garrett has been to-day painting the hall for the Chicago Exhibition. She is going to the dance to-night. She says Mrs. Fawcett got some more money out of the English Commissioners in a lovely way. These Commissioners have spent £17,000 in building themselves a kiosk in the ground, and they allowed Mrs. Fawcett £500 to represent women’s work in England. Every one is furious about it. Well, Mrs. Fawcett has managed to get an extra £500. She wrote, and said that if she did not get any more she could not mount all the photographs and drawings, but would put up a notice that “the English Commission was too poor to allow for mounting and framing.” This, with the kiosk in the ground!

‘One of the patients here was once upon a time a servant at the Baroness Burdett Coutts’. She certainly was most awfully kind to her, sent her £10 to pay her rent, and has now paid to send her to the Cottage. Miss B. is in hopes she may get her interested in the hospital now, but it seems she does not approve of women doctors and such things. Perhaps, as the old housemaid did so well here, she may change her mind. The Report is out now. I shall send them to some of the doctors in Edinburgh. I see in it that Mr. Robertson left £1000 in memory of his wife to the hospital, and that is how that bed comes to be called the “Caroline Croom Robertson bed.”

‘We had two big operations to-day. We had the usual round in the morning, and then we had to prepare. I did one lovely thing! This morning, I pointed out to Mrs. Scharlieb with indignation that our galvanic battery had run out. I said that it really was disgraceful of C., for it had only been used once for a quarter of an hour since the last time he had charged it. Mrs. S. agreed, and said she would go in and speak to him and tell him to send her battery, which was with him being charged. We wanted a battery for the galvanic cautery. Well, Mrs. Scharlieb’s battery arrived. I tried it, and found it would not heat the cautery properly. So I was very angry, and I sat down and wrote C. a peppery letter. I told him to send some competent person at once to look at the battery, and to be prepared to lend us one, if this competent person saw it was necessary. M. flew off, and in twenty minutes a man from C. arrived, very humble. I turned on the batteries, and showed him that they would not heat up properly. Sister said I talked to him like a mother. He departed very humbly to bring another battery. In about half an hour Sister whistled up, C.’s man would like to see me. Down I went. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “You had not taken the resistance off, Miss,” and held one of the cautery red-hot attached to our own battery. Was not I sold! I had humbly to apologise. And the amount of nervous energy I had wasted on that battery!

‘We began to-day with a big operation. It went perfectly splendidly. The chloroform was given by a Dr. B., some special friend of the patient, so, I hoped there would be no hitch, and there was none. He had the cheek afterwards to say to Dr. S., that no one could have done it better! Mrs. S. seemed rather pleased, but I thought it awfully patronising, was it not?

‘Did I tell you that Mrs. S. and Miss Walker were talking the other morning of the time when they would make this a qualifying hospital? Miss C. said it would certainly come some day, and of course, to make it a qualifying hospital, they must have men’s beds, and that will mean a mixed staff. However, all that is in the future. Then, we will show the old-fashioned hospitals, with their retrograde managers, etc., how a mixed staff can work. I wonder if they will have mixed classes too!

‘I enjoyed King Lear very much. The scenery was magnificent. King Lear was not a bit kingly, but just a weak, old man. I suppose that was what he was meant to be. Ellen Terry was splendid. The storm on the heath awful. I shivered in my seat when the wind whistled. The last scene—the French camp on the cliffs on Dover—was really beautiful.

‘Yesterday, I did a lovely thing—slept like a top till almost nine. I suppose I was tired after the exciting cases. Janet burst into my room with “Mrs. S. will be here in a very few minutes, Miss.” So, out I tumbled, and tore downstairs to meet Mrs. S. in the hall! I tried to look as if I had had breakfast hours before, and I don’t think she suspected that was my first appearance. She did her visit, and then I went to breakfast. As luck would have it, Mrs. G. Anderson chose that morning of all others to show a friend of hers round the hospital. She marched calmly into the board-room to find me grubbing. I saw the only thing to do was to be quite cool, so I got up and shook hands, and remarked, “I am rather late this morning,” and she only laughed. It was about 10.30, a nice time for an H.S. to be having breakfast.

‘I did not go to hear Father Maturin after all yesterday. I have been very busy; we have had another big operation, doing all right so far. She is an artist’s wife; she has had an unhappy time for four years, because she has been very ill, and their doctor said it was hysteria, and told her husband not to give in to the nonsense. Really, some of these general practitioners are grand. They send some of the patients in with the most outrageous diagnoses you can imagine. One woman was told her life was not worth a year’s purchase, and she must have a big operation. So she came in. We pummelled her all over, and could not find the grounds of his diagnosis, and finally treated for something quite different, and she went out well in six weeks. Her doctor came to see her, and said, “Well, madam, I could not have believed it.” It is better they should err in that direction than in the direction of calling real illness “hysteria.”

‘I mean to have a hospital of my own in Edinburgh some day.

‘A patient with a well-balanced nervous system will get well in just half the time that one of these hysterical women will. There is one plucky little woman in just now. She has had a bad operation, but nothing has ever disturbed her equilibrium. She smiles away in the pluckiest way, and gets well more quickly than anybody. I agree with Kingsley: one of the necessities of the world is to teach girls to be brave, and not whine over everything, and the first step for that is to teach them to play games!

‘Fancy who has been here this evening—Bailie Walcot. He has come up to London on Parliamentary business. He investigated every hole and corner of the hospital. He says our girls are going to Dr. Littlejohn’s class with Jex’s girls at Surgery Hall. It is wonderful how these men who would do nothing at first are beginning to see it pays to be neutral now.

‘We have a lot to be grateful to J. B. for; Bailie W. told me the Leith managers have approached the Edinburgh managers, saying, “If you will undertake no more women students, we will undertake to take both schools, and to build immediately.” Bailie Walcot said he and Mr. Scott of St. George’s were the only two who opposed this. If they send us down to Leith we must make the best of it, and really try to make it a good school, but it will be a great pity.

‘The dance was awfully nice. Mrs. G. Anderson is a capital chaperone. I managed to go off without my ticket, and the damsel at the door was very severe, and said I must wait till Mrs. Garrett Anderson came. I waited quietly a minute or two, and was just going to ask her to send in to see if Mrs. Anderson had come, then a man marched in, and said in a lovely manner, “I have forgotten my ticket,” and she merely said, “You must give me your name, sir,” and let him pass. After that I gave my name and passed too! I found I might have waited till doomsday, for Mrs. G. A. was inside. I danced every dance; it was a lovely floor and lovely music, and you may make up your mind, papa dear, that I go to all the balls in Edinburgh after this. They had two odd dances called Barn-door. I thought it would be a kind of Sir Roger, but it was the oddest kind of hop, skip and dance I ever saw. I said to Mrs. G. A. it was something like a Schottische, only not a quarter so pretty. She said it was pretty when nicely danced, but people have not learnt it yet. I rashly said to Mrs. G. A. that I could get some tea from the night nurse when I got home (because I wanted to dance the extras), but she was horrified at tea just before going to sleep, and swept me into the refreshment-room and made me drink soup by the gallon. I came home with Miss Garrett. We had an operation this morning, so you see dances don’t interfere with the serious business of life.

‘Mrs. Scharlieb came in here the other day, and declared I was qualifying for acute bronchitis; but I told her nobody could have acute bronchitis who had a cold bath every morning, and had been brought up to open windows. This is the third sit down to your letter. Talk of women at home never being able to do anything without being interrupted every few minutes! I think you have only to be house surgeon to know what being interrupted means. They not only knock and march in at the door, but they also whistle up the tube—most frightfully startling it used to be at first, to hear a sort of shrill fog-horn in the room. There are three high temperatures, and the results are sent up to me whenever they are taken. We are sponging them, and may have to put them into cold baths, but I hope not. Mrs. G. A. told me to do it without waiting for the chief, if I thought it necessary, whereupon Mrs. B. remarked, “I think Miss Inglis ought to be warned the patient may die.”

‘Lovely weather here. I have been prescribing sunshine, sunshine, sunshine for all the patients. There are only two balconies on each floor, and nurse Rose is reported to have said that she supposed I wanted the patients hung out over the railings, for otherwise there would not be room. Miss W. came this morning, to Sister’s indignation. “Does not she think she can trust me for one day?” So I said it was only that she was so delighted at having a ward; and that I was sure I would do the same. “Oh,” said Sister, “I am thankful you have not a ward. You would bring a box with sandwiches and sit there all day.” I am always having former H.S.’s thrown at my head who came round exactly to the minute, twice a day, whereas they say I am never out of the wards, at least they never know when I am coming. I tell them I don’t want them to trot round after me with an ink-bottle. Miss R. says I have no idea of discipline! I make one grand round a day, with the ink-bottle, and then I don’t want the nurses to take any more notice of me. I think that is far more sensible than having fixed times. I quite agree the ink-bottle round ought to be at a fixed time, but I cannot help other things turning up to be done.

‘I had to toddle off and ask for Mrs. K. She is the one who is appointed to give anæsthetics in the hospital. They are all most frightfully nervous about anæsthetics here, in all the hospitals, and have regular anæsthetists. In Edinburgh and Glasgow the students give it, under the house surgeons of course. I never saw any death, or anything that was very frightening. One real reason is, I believe, that they watch the wrong organ, viz. the heart. In Scotland they hardly think of the heart, and simply watch the breathing. The Hydrabad Commission settled conclusively that it was the breathing gave out first; but having made up their minds that it does not, all the Commissions in the world won’t convince them to the contrary. In the meantime they do their operations in fear and trembling, continually asking if the patient is all right.

‘You never saw such a splendid out-patient department as they have here—a perfectly lovely, comfortable waiting-room, and pretty receiving waiting-room. The patients have to pay a small sum, yet they had over 20,000 visits this year up to November—that is about half the size of the Glasgow Royal, one of the biggest out-patients in the kingdom, and general. This is paying, and for women! Who says women doctors are not wanted!

‘This morning I started off, meaning to go to Dr. Vaughan in the Temple Church. Sister C. told me I ought to be early, and of course I was as late as I could be. As I was running downstairs Nurse Helen asked me if I had ever heard Stopford Brooke. I had heard his name, but I could not remember anything about him. Nurse H. said he was an awful heretic, and had got into trouble for his opinions. As a general rule men who get into trouble for their opinions are worth listening to—at least they have opinions. So I left Dr. Vaughan, and went off to Mr. S. Brooke. He gave a capital sermon with nothing heterodox in it, about loving our fellow-men. I liked him, and would go to-night to hear his lecture on “In Memoriam,” but Sister C. is going out.

‘You know you must not aim at a separate but at a mixed school in Edinburgh. I am sure this is best, and all the women here think so too. I wonder when the University means to succumb.

‘Mrs. G. Anderson asked me to come and help her with a small operation in an hotel. She gave me a half-guinea fee for so doing. We drove there in a hansom, and drove back in her carriage. She was most jovial and talkative. We went into the Deanery, Westminster Abbey, on our way back to leave cards on somebody. You suddenly seem to get out of the noise and rush of London when you turn in there. It is quite quiet and green. All sorts of men were wandering about in red gowns and black gowns. We were told it was Convocation.

‘Mrs. Scharlieb was awfully nice and kind. She said she hoped I would get on always as well as I had here. Was not it nice of her? I said I hoped I would do much better, for I thought I had made an awful lot of mistakes since I came here. She says everybody has to make mistakes. The worst of being a doctor is that one’s mistakes matter so much. In everything else you just throw away what you have messed and begin again, but you cannot do that as a doctor.

‘She said she expects to be called in as my consultant when I am a surgeon. Won’t my patients have to pay fees to get her up from London!

‘Miss C. has been trying to get on to some of the medical societies, and has failed. I shall not demean myself by asking to get on—shall wait till they beseech the honour of adding my name.

‘As to women doctors here having an assured position, I rather like the pioneer work, I think! I mean to make friends with all the nice doctors, and vanquish all the horrid selfish ones, and end by being a Missionary Professor.

‘If I don’t get into the Infirmary in Edinburgh, I mean to build a hospital for myself, like this one. Indeed I don’t know that I should not like the hospital to myself better! I’ll build it where the Cattle Market is, at the head of Lady Lawson Street. That would be convenient for all the women in Fountainbridge, and the Grassmarket and Cowgate, and it would be comparatively high. To begin with, I mean to rent Eva’s hall from her for a dispensary. You see it is all arranged!’

The next course Elsie decided on taking was one of three months in Midwifery in the Rotunda, Dublin. There was a greater equality of teaching there in mixed classes, and also she thought the position of the whole hospital staff was on lines which would enable her to gain the most experience in this branch, where she ultimately achieved so much for her fellow-citizens in Edinburgh.

‘Costigan’s Hotel, Upper Sackville St.,
‘Dublin, Nov. 18, 1893.

‘I went over to the Rotunda and saw Dr. Glenn, the assistant master. I am “clerk” on Mondays and Thursdays. The only other person here is a native from the Nizam’s Dominions. At breakfast this morning he told me about his children, who are quite fair “like their mother.” How fond he was of London, and how he would not live in India now for anything; he finds the climate enervating! I told him I thought India a first-rate place to live in, and that I should like to go back.

‘By the way, fancy the franchise for the Parish Councils being carried. The first thing I saw when I landed was defeat of the Government! The Independent here is jubilant, partly because the point of woman’s suffrage is carried, partly because the Government is beaten.

‘So the strike has ended, and the men go back to work on their old wages till February. I expect both sides are sick of it, but I am glad the men have carried it so far. Lord Rosebery is a clever man.

‘Mrs. C. evidently thinks I am quite mad, for I have asked for a cold bath in my room. “Good gracious me, miss! it’s not cold entoirely ye’ll be meaning.”

‘I went to see the D.’s. The first thing I was told was that a Miss D. sat in their church, an M.B. of the Royal Infirmary. A very clever girl, she has just taken a travelling bursary and is going to Vienna. “But we don’t know her, they are Home Rulers!” Mrs. D. went on to say both she and her father were Home Rulers, but that she for one would not mind if they did not obtrude their politics. So, I thought, “Well, I won’t obtrude mine.” Then Mrs. D. said, “You must take a side, you know, and say distinctly what side you are on when you are asked.” So I thought, “Well, I’ll wait till I am asked,” and I have got through to-day without being asked. But, positively, they used the word “boycott” about those D.’s. They have been boycotted by the congregation. It must be rather hard to be a Home Ruler and a Presbyterian just now in Ireland. Positively, they frightened me so, I nearly squirmed under the table. However, when I looked round the congregation I thought I should not mind much being boycotted by them. The sermon was one about forgiving your enemies. Mrs. D. has given me a standing invitation to come to dinner on Sunday. What will happen when I am suddenly asked to take my side, I don’t know. In the meantime I will let things slide! Mrs. D. asked me if the Costigans were Catholics, and said she thought Mrs. C. looked so nice she could not be one.’

‘Dec. 1893.

‘I have done nothing but race after cases to-day. One old woman was killing. She came for Dr. B., whom she said she had known before he was born. Dr. B. could not go, so I went. “Hech,” she said, “I came for a doctor.” “Well, I’m the doctor. Come along.” “Deed no,” she said; “ye’re no a doctor—ye’re just a wumman.” I did laugh, and marched her off. She was grandly tipsy when I left the home, so I am going back to see how the patient has got on, in spite of the nursing.

‘I had a second polite speech made to me last night. I was introduced into a house by the person who came for me as the doctor. When I had been in about two minutes, a small man of four years old, said suddenly in a clear voice “That is not a doctor, it’s a girl!” I told him he was behind the age not to know that one could be both.

‘We had a chloroform scare this morning. I admired Dr. S.’s coolness immensely. He finished tying his stitches quietly while two doctors were skipping round like a pair of frightened girls. It ended all right. They don’t know how to give chloroform anywhere out of Scotland. It is very odd.

‘Mrs. D. declared she was going to write to you that she had found I had gone out without my breakfast. So, here are the facts! I was out last night, and was not up when they rang over for me. So, before having my breakfast I just ran over to see what they wanted me for, and finding it would keep I came back for my breakfast to find Mrs. D. here. I am not such an idiot as to miss my meals, Papa, dearest. My temper won’t stand it! I always have a glass of milk and a biscuit when I go out at night. I am as sensible as I can be. I know you cannot do work with blunt instruments, and this instrument blunts very easily without food and exercise.

‘Jan. 1, 1894.

‘I have been round all my patients to-day, and had to drink glasses of very questionable wine in each house. It is really very trying to a practical teetotaller like me. Literally, I could hardly see them when I left the last house! There was simply no getting off it, and I did not want to hurt their feelings. When they catch hold of your hand and say “Now, doctor dear, or doctor jewel, ye’ll just be takin’ a wee glass, deed an ye will,” what are you to do?

‘Do you think this “Famasha” with the French in Africa is going to be the beginning of the big war? That is an awful idea. England single-handed against Europe. But, it would be the English-speaking peoples, Australia, the States, and Canada.

‘I have made a convert to the ranks of women’s rights. Did I tell you that Dr. B. and I had had an awful argument. I never mentioned the subject again, for it is no good arguing with a man who has made up his mind (and is a North of Ireland man, who will die in the last ditch into the bargain). However, in the middle of the operation, he suddenly said, “By the way, you are right about the suffrage, Miss Inglis.” Then I found he had come over about the whole question. As a convert is always the most violent supporter, I hope he’ll do some good.

‘Feb. 5, 1894.

‘After three months you have learnt all the Rotunda can teach. If you were a man, it would be worth while to stay, because senior students, if they are men, get a lot of the C.C.’s work to do. But they never think of letting you do it if you are a woman. It is not deliberate unfairness, but they never think of it. If one stays six months they examine one, and give a degree, L.M., Licentiate of Midwifery. If I could I would rather spend three months in Paris with Pozzi. I have learnt a tremendous lot here, and feel very happy about my work in this special line. It is their methods which are so good. If you can really afford to give me another three months it would be wiser to go to Paris. There are three men who are quite in the front rank there, Pozzi, Apostoli, and Péon.’

‘Costigan’s, Upper Sackville Street,
‘Dublin, Feb. 10, 1894.

‘I got your letter at eleven when I came down to breakfast. I shall never get into regular order for home again. No one blames one for lying in bed here or being late, for no one knows how late you have been up the night before, or how many cases you have been at before you get to the lecture. It is partly that, and partly their casual Irish ways. I have had a letter from Miss MacGregor this morning, asking what I should say to our starting together in Edinburgh. It is a thing to be thought about. It is quite true, as she says, that two women are much more comfortable working together. They can give chloroform for one another and so on, and consult together. On the other hand, we could do that just as well if we simply started separately, and were friends.

‘Miss MacGregor was one of the J.-B. lot, and she and I had awful rows over that question. But we certainly got on very well before that, and, as she says, that was not a personal question. I am quite sure Miss MacGregor is Scotch enough not to propose any arrangement which won’t be to her own advantage. Probably, I know a good many more people than she does. The question for me is whether it will be for my advantage. I am rather inclined to think it will. Miss MacGregor is a splendid pathologist. Nowadays one ought to do a lot of that work with one’s cases, and I have been puzzling over how one could, and yet keep aseptic. If we could make some arrangement by which we could work into one another’s hands in that way, I think it would be for both our advantages. There is one thing in favour of it, if Miss MacGregor and I are definitely working together, no one can be astonished at our not calling in other people. Miss MacGregor, apart from everything else, is distinctly one of our best women, and it would be nice working with her. What do you think of it, Papa, dear? Of course I should live at home in any case. My consulting rooms anyhow would have to be outside, for the old ladies would not climb up the stair!

‘Dublin, Feb. 1894.

‘I do thank you so much for having let me come here. I have learnt such a lot. The money has certainly not been wasted. But it was awfully good of you to let me come. I am sure it will make a difference all my life. I really feel on my feet in this subject now. The more I think of it, the more I think it would be wise to start with Miss MacGregor. Apart altogether from Eva’s instincts! we will start the dispensary, and we’ll end by having a hospital like the Rotunda, where students shall live on the premises—female students only. Not that these boys are not very nice and good-natured, only they are out of place in the Rotunda.’

This was nearly the last letter written by Elsie to her father. In most of her letters during the preceding months it was obvious Mr. Inglis’ health was causing her anxiety, and the inquiries and suggestions for his well-being grew more urgent as the shadow of death fell increasingly dark on the written pages.

Elsie returned to receive his eager welcome, but even her eyes were blinded to the rapidly approaching parting. On the 15th of March 1894, she wrote to her brother Ernest in India, telling all the story of Mr. Inglis’ passing on the 13th of that month. There was much suffering borne with quiet patience, ‘He never once complained: I never saw such a patient.’ At the end, he turned towards the window, and then a bright look came into his eyes. He said, ‘Pull down the blind.’ Then the chivalrous, knightly soul passed into the light that never was on sea or land.

‘It was a splendid life he led,’ writes Elsie to her brother; ‘his old Indian friends write now and say how “the name of John Inglis always represented everything that was upright and straightforward and high principled in the character of a Christian gentleman.” He always said that he did not believe that death was the stopping place, but that one would go on growing and learning through all eternity. God bless him in his onward journey. I simply cannot imagine life without him. We had made such plans, and now it does not seem worth while to go on working at all. I wish he could have seen me begin. He was so pleased about my beginning. I said it would be such a joke to see Dr. Elsie Inglis up. Saturday afternoons were to be his, and he was to come over in my trap.

‘He never thought of himself at all. Even when he was very ill at the end, he always looked up when one went in, and said, “Well, my darling.” I am glad I knew about nursing, for we did not need to have any stranger about him. He would have hated that.’

CHAPTER VI
POLITICAL ENFRANCHISEMENT AND NATIONAL POLITICS

‘Well done, New Zealand! I expect I shall live to have a vote.’—E. M. I., 1891.

‘I envy not in any mood

The captive void of noble rage,

The linnet born within the cage,

That never knew the summer woods.’

‘So the vote has come! and for our work. Fancy its having taken the war to show them how ready we were to work! Or even to show that that work was necessary. Where do they think the world would have been without women’s work all these ages?’—E. M. I., Reni, Russia, June 1917.

Mr. David Inglis, writing to his son on his marriage in 1845, says:—

‘I cannot express the deep interest, or the ardent hopes with which my bosom is filled on the occasion, or the earnest though humble prayer to the Giver of all good which it has uttered that He may shed abundantly upon you both the rich mercies of His grace: with those feelings I take each of you to my heart, and give you my parental love and blessing. You have told me enough of the object of your fond choice to make her henceforth dear to me, to all of us, on her own account, as well as yours.

‘And here, my beloved David, I would turn for a moment more immediately to yourself, as being now in a situation very different from that in which you have hitherto been placed. As a husband, then, it will now behove you to remember that you are not your own exclusive property—that for a single moment you must never forget; the tender love and affectionate respect and consideration which are due from you to the amiable individual who has bestowed on you her hand and heart, it will, I assure myself, be your pleasing duty to prove, by unceasing attention to, and solicitude for, her every wish how dearly you appreciate her worth, as well as gift; and that her future comfort and happiness will invariably possess an estimation in your view paramount to every feeling that can more immediately or personally affect yourself. Let such be manifest in your every act, as connected with every object in which she is concerned. Her love and affection for you will then be reciprocal and pure and lasting, and thus will you become to each other what, under God’s blessing, you are meant to be—a mutual comfort and an abiding stay. Make her the confidential friend of your bosom, to whom its every thought must unreservedly be imparted—the soother of all its cares, its anxieties, and disappointments, when they chance to arise; the fond participator in all your happiness and joys, from whatever source they may spring—you will thus be discharging a duty which your sacred obligations at the altar have entailed upon you.’

This letter has been quoted with its phrasing of seventy years ago, because it shows an advanced outlook on the position of husband and wife, and the setting forth of their equality and the respect paid to their several positions. It may have influenced Mr. Inglis’ views, both in his perfect relations with his wife and the sympathetic liberty of thought and action which he encouraged in his own family.

This chapter is devoted to the political and public life of Elsie Inglis. It can be written in a fortunate hour. The ‘common cause’ to which she gave so much of her life has now been won. The tumult and the turmoil are now hushed in peace and security. The age which began in John Stuart Mill’s ‘Subjection of Women’ has ended in the Representation of the People’s Bill. It is possible to review the political period of the generation which produced Elsie Inglis, and her comrades in the struggle against the disqualification of sex, without raising any fresh controversy.

We may safely say that Dr. Inglis was one of the finest types of women produced by the ideals and inspiring purposes of the generation to which she belonged. She was born when a woman was the reigning Sovereign, and when her influence and power were at its height. Four years after her birth the Reform Bill of 1868 was to make the first claim for women as citizens in the British Parliament. The Married Woman’s Property Act, and the laws affecting Divorce, had recognised them as something else than the goods and chattels or the playthings and bondwomen of the ‘predominant partner.’ Mary Somerville had convinced the world that a woman could have a brain. Timidly, and yet resolutely, women were claiming a higher education, and Universities were slamming to their doors, with a petty horde of maxims claimed to be based on divine authority. Women pioneers mounted platforms and asserted ‘Rights,’ and qualified for jealously closed professions—always, from the first, upheld and companied by ‘Greathearts,’ men few but chosen, who, like John Inglis, recognised that no community was the stronger for keeping its people, be they black or white, male or female, in any form of ignorance or bonded serfdom.

As Elsie grew up, she found herself walking in the new age. Doors were set ajar, if not fully opened. The first wave of ridicule and of conscientious objections had spent its force. A girl’s school might play games decorously and not lose all genteel deportment. Girls might show a love of knowledge, and no longer be hooted as blue-stockings. The use of the globes and cross-stitch gave place to learning which might fit them to be educated, and useful members of the community. Ill-health ceased to be considered part of the curse of Eve, to be borne with swooning resignation on the wide sofas of the early Victorian Age. Ignorance and innocence were not recognised as twin sisters, and women, having eaten of the tree of knowledge, looked round a world which prided itself on giving equal justice to all men, and discovered that very often that axiom covered a multitude of sins of injustice against all womankind.

It was through Elsie’s professional life that she learnt to know how often the law was against the woman’s best interests, and it was always in connection with some reform that she longed to initiate, that she expressed a desire for the Vote.

To her Father

‘Glasgow, 1891.

‘Many thanks for your letter about women’s rights. You are ahead of all the world in everything, and they gradually come up into line with you—the Westminster Confession and everything except Home Rule! The amusing thing about women preaching is that they do it, but as it is not in the churches it is not supposed to be in opposition to Paul. They are having lots of meetings in the hall downstairs; every single one of them is addressed by a woman. But, of course, they could not give the same address in a church and with men listening! At Queen Margaret’s here, they are having a course of lectures on the Old Testament from the lecturer on that subject in the University, but then, of course it is not “Divinity.”’

The opponents to Woman’s Franchise admittedly occupied an illogical position, and Elsie’s abounding sense of humour never failed to make use of all the opportunities of laughter which the many absurdities of the long fight evoked. No one with that sense as highly developed could ever turn cynical or bitter. It was only when cruelty and injustice came under her ken that a fine scorn dominated her thought and speech. She gives to her father some of these instances:—

‘I got a paper to sign to thank the M.P.’s who voted for Sir A. Rollitt’s Woman’s Suffrage Bill. I got it filled up in half a minute. I wish she had sent half a dozen. There is no question among women who have to work for themselves about wanting the suffrage. It is the women who are safe and sound in their own drawing-rooms who don’t see what on earth they want it for.

‘I have just been so angry! A woman came in yesterday very ill. A. took down her case, and thought she would have to have an operation. Then her husband arrived, and calmly said she was to go home, because he could not look after the children. So I said that if she went she went on her own responsibility, for I would not give my consent. He said the baby was ill. I said, “Well, take it to a hospital.” Then it turned out it was not ill, but had cried last night. I said I saw very well what it was, that he had had a bad night, and had just determined that his wife should have the bad night to-night, even though she was ill, instead of him. He did look ashamed of himself, selfish cad! Helpless creature, he could not even arrange for some one to come in and take charge of those children unless his wife went home to do it. She had got some one yesterday, but he had had a row with her. I gave him my mind pretty clearly, but I went in just now to find she had gone. I said she was stupid. So one woman said, “It was not ’er fault, Miss; ’e would have it.”

‘I wonder when married women will learn they have any other duty in the world than to obey their husbands. They were not even her children—they were step-children. You don’t know what trouble we have here with the husbands. They will come in the day before the operation, after the woman has been screwed up to it, and worry them with all sorts of outside things, and want them home when they are half dying. Any idea that anybody is to be thought of but themselves never enters their lordly minds, and the worst of it is these stupid idiots of women don’t seem to think so either: “’E wants it, Miss,” settles the question. I always say—“It does not matter one fig what he wants. The question is what you want.” They don’t seem to think they have any right to any individual existence. Well, I feel better now, but I wish I could have scragged that beast. I have to go to the wards now!

‘We had another row with a tyrannical husband. I did not know whether to be most angry with him or his fool of a wife. She had one of the most painful things anybody can have, an abscess in her breast. It was so bad Miss Webb would not do anything for it in the out-patients’, but said she was to come in at once. The woman said she would go and arrange for somebody to look after her baby and come back at six. At six appeared her lord and master. “I cannot let my wife come in, as the baby is not old enough to be left with anybody else.” Did you ever hear anything so monstrous? That one human being is to settle for another human being whether she is to be cured or not. I asked him whether he knew how painful it was, and if he had to bear the pain. Miss Webb appealed to him, that he was responsible for his wife’s health, for he seemed to assume he was not. Both grounds were far above his intellect, either his responsibility or his wife’s rights. He just stood there like an obstinate mule. We told him it was positively brutal, and that he was to go at once and get a good doctor home with him if he would not let her in. Of course, he did not.

‘What a fool the woman must have been to have educated him up to that. There really was no necessity for her to stay out because he said she was to—poor thing. Miss Webb and I have struck up a great friendship as the result. After we had both fumed about for some time, I said, “Well, the only way to educate that kind of man, or that kind of woman, is to get the franchise.” Miss Webb said, “Bravo, bravo,” then I found she was a great franchise woman, and has been having terrible difficulties with her L.W.A. here.’

The writer may add one more to these instances. Suffrage meetings were of a necessity much alike, and the round of argument was much the same. Spade-work had to be done among men and women who had the mental outlook of these patients and the overlords of their destiny. Meetings were rarely enthusiastic or crowded, and it was often like speaking into the heart of a pincushion. To one of these meetings Dr. Inglis came by train straight from her practice. In memory’s halls all meetings are alike, but one stands out, where Dr. Inglis illustrated her argument by a fact in her day’s experience. The law does not permit an operation on a married woman without her husband’s consent. That day the consent had been refused, and the woman was to be left to lingering suffering from which only death could release her. The voice and the thrill which pervaded speaker and audience as Dr. Inglis told the tale and pointed the moral, remains an abiding memory.

Her politics were Liberal, and, what was more remarkable, she was a convinced Home Ruler. Those who believe that women in politics naturally take the line of the home, may find here a very strong instance of the independent mind, producing no rift within the lute that sounded such a perfect note of unison between her and the prevailing influence of her youth. Mr. Inglis had done his work in India, and his politics were of an Imperialist rather than that of a ‘Home Ruler All Round.’ When Mr. Gladstone introduced his Home Rule Bill of 1893, Elsie complains of the obstructive talk in Parliament. Mr. Inglis gently says she seems to wish it passed without discussion. Elsie replies on the points she thinks salient and likely to work, and wonders why they should not commend themselves to sense and not words. The family have recollections of long and not acrimonious debates well sustained on either side.

She was a member of the W.L.F., and was always impatient of the way Party was placed before the Franchise.

‘I was sorry to see how the Suffrage question was pushed into the background by Lady Aberdeen. However, I shall stick to the Federation, and bring them to their senses on that point as far as my influence goes. It is simply sham Liberalism that will not recognise that it is a real Liberal question (1893).

‘That is a capital letter of Miss M‘Laren’s. It is quite true, and women are awful fools to truckle to their party, instead of putting their foot down, about the Franchise. You would certainly hear more about wife murders than you do at present, if the women had a vote.

‘Do you know what they said at the Liberal Club the other day in answer to some deputation, or appeal, or rather it was said, in the discussion, that the Liberal Party would do all they could to remedy abuses and give women justice, but the vote they would not give, because they would put a power into women’s hand which could never be taken away. Plain speaking, was it not?

‘Did I tell you that I have to speak at a drawing-room meeting on Woman’s Suffrage? Mrs. Elmy asked me to. I had just refused to write a paper for her on the present state of medical education in the country, for I thought that would be too great cheek in a house surgeon, so I did not like to refuse the other.

‘The drawing-room meeting yesterday was very good. I got there late, and found a fearfully and awfully fashionable audience being harangued by a very smart-looking man, who spoke uncommonly well, and was saying everything I meant to say.

‘Mrs. Elmy smiled and nodded away to me, and suddenly it flashed on me that I was to second the motion this man was speaking to. I was in such an awful funk that I got cool, and got up and told them that I did not think Mr. Wilkins had left any single thing for me to say; however, as things struck people in different ways I should simply tell them how it struck me, and then went ahead with what I meant to say when I got in. Mrs. Elmy was quite pleased, and several people came up afterwards, and said I had got on all right. Mrs. Elmy said, I had not repeated Mr. W., only emphasised him. He was such a fluent speaker, he scared me awfully.’

The decade that saw the controversy of Home Rule for Ireland, was the first that brought women prominently into political organisations. Many women’s associations were formed, and the religious aspect as between Ulster and the South interested many very deeply. Elsie was not a Liberal-Unionist, and, as she states her case to her father, there is much that shows that she was thinking the matter out for herself, on lines which were then fresher than they are to-day.

From Glasgow, in 1891, she writes:—

‘I have spent a wicked Sunday. I read all the morning, and then went up to the Infirmary to bandage with Dr. D. Dr. T. says I am quite sure to be plucked, after such worldliness. I have discovered he is an Australian from Victoria. Dr. D. is an Aberdeen man and a great admirer of George Smith. Also, a violent Home Ruler. Never mind about the agricultural labourer, Papa dear! I am afraid Gladstone’s majority won’t be a working one, and we shall have the whole row over again in six months. Dr. D. says every available voter has been seized by the scruff of his neck and made to vote this time. And, six months hence there’ll be no fresh light on the situation, and we’ll be where we are now. I should not wonder if the whole thing makes us devise some plan for one Imperial Parliament and local government for Ireland, Scotland, and the Colonies, ending in making the integrity of the Empire “and unity of the English speaking race” more apparent than it is now, and with the Irish contented and managing their own affairs in their own mad way. Our future trouble is with the Labour Party.

‘Mr. Gladstone has been so engrossed with his H.R. measure that he does not seem to have noticed these other questions that have been quickly growing, and he has made two big blunders about Woman’s Suffrage and the Labour question. I have no doubt these men are talking a lot of nonsense, and are trying for impossibilities, but there is a great deal of sense in what they say. It is no good shutting our eyes to the facts they bring forward.

‘As to Mr. D., I am very much afraid you would not agree with him. He is a rank Socialist. The only point in which he agrees with you is that he would make everybody do what he thinks right. Only his ideas of right are very different from yours. He believes in an eight-hour day, local option, and State-owned mines. His chief amusement at present is arguing with me. He generally gets angry, and says, “I argue like a woman,” but he always pluckily begins again. He was a tradesman, and gave it up because he says you cannot be an honest tradesman nowadays. He is studying medicine; the last day I worked at “brains” he rampaged about the room arguing about the unearned increment. I tell him he must come and argue in Edinburgh—I have not time at present.

‘I will tell you what I think of the Home Rule Bill to-morrow—that is to say, if I have time to read it. It is really a case of officers and men here just now. I can’t say “go on” instead of “come on.” I cannot order cold spongings and hot fomentations by the dozen and then sit in my room and read the newspapers, can I?’

‘Glasgow, May 1892.

‘What do you think of Lord Salisbury’s speech, inciting to rebellion and civil war? Now, don’t think of it as Lord Salisbury and Ulster, but think of it as advice given by Mr. Gladstone to the rest of Ireland. If you like to take the lead into your own hands and march on Dublin; I don’t know that any Government would care to use the forces of the Crown against you. You will be quite justified because the Government of your country is in the hands of your hereditary foes. There is only one good point in Lord Salisbury’s speech, and that is that he does not sham that the Ulster men are Irishmen. He calls them a colony from this country. Lord S. must have been feeling desperate before he made that speech.’

‘1894.

‘I think Mr. Chamberlain’s speech was very clever. It was this special Home Rule Bill he pulled to pieces, and one could not help feeling that that would have been the result whatever the Bill had been, if it had been introduced by anybody but Mr. C. His argument seemed to be in favour of Imperial Federation, as far as I could make out. I have no doubt the Bill can be very much improved in committee, but the groundwork of it is all right. The two Houses and the gradual giving over of the police and land, when they have had time to find their feet. As to the retaining the Irish members in Parliament being totally illogical, there is nothing in that; we always make illogical things work. And the Irish members must stay.

‘I do like Mr. Balfour. He is so honest. I expect he hates the Irish Party as much as any man, but he spoke up for them all the same. If he had not, I don’t believe Mr. Chamberlain and some of the others would have spoken as they did. The Conservative Party was quite inclined to laugh at the paid stipendiaries until Mr. Balfour spoke.

‘I have been reading up the Bishop of Chester’s scheme and the Direct Veto Bill. I don’t like his scheme. It would be very nice to turn all the pubs into coffee-houses, but a big company over whom the ratepayers have no control would be just as likely to do what would pay best, as the tramway companies now, who work their men seventeen hours and their horses three, at a stretch. It would be quite a different thing to put the pubs under the Town and County Councils. As to this Bill it is not to stop people drinking, but simply to shut up pubs. A man can still buy his whisky and get drunk in his own house, but a community says, “We won’t have the nuisance of a pub at every corner,” and I am not sure that they have not that right, just as much as the private individual has to get drunk if he chooses. A great many men would keep straight if the temptation were not thrown in their faces. The system of licences was instituted for the good of the public, not the good of the publican.

‘The Elections will be three weeks after my exam. Dearest Papa!—There is as much chance of Mr. Gladstone being beaten in Midlothian as there is of a Conservative majority.’

Another friend writes:—

‘I should like to send you a recollection of her in the early Nineties. My friend, Dr. Jessie MacGregor, wrote to my home in Rothesay, asking us to put up Dr. Inglis, who was to give an address at a Sanitary Congress to be held there. It was, I believe, her first public appearance, and she did do well. One woman alone on a platform filled with well-known doctors from all parts! Her subject was advocating women as sanitary inspectors. She was one of the pioneers in that movement also. I can well remember her, a slim little girl in black, fearless as ever, doing her part. After she had finished, there was a running criticism of her subject. Many against her view, few for the cause on which she was speaking. It was an unique experience. The discussion got quite hot. One well-known doctor asked us to picture his dear friend Elsie Inglis carrying out a six-foot smallpox patient.

‘I think she was the first lady medical to speak at a Congress. It was such a pleasure to entertain her, she was so quiet and unobtrusive, and yet so humorous. I never met her again, but I could never forget her, though we were just like ships that pass in the night.’

One of her Suffrage organisers, Miss Bury, gives a vivid picture of her work in the Suffrage cause:—

‘It was Dr. Elsie Inglis who brought me to Scotland, and sent me to organise Suffrage societies in the Highlands. I speak of her as I knew her, the best of chiefs, so kind and encouraging and appreciative of one’s efforts, even when they were not always crowned with success. I remember saying I was disappointed because the hall was only about three-quarters full, and her reply was, “My dear, I was not counting the people, I was thinking of the efforts which had brought those who were there.”

‘Her letters were an inspiration. She gave one the full responsibility of one’s position, and always expected the best. Resolutely direct, and straightforward in her dealings with me as a subordinate worker, she never failed to tell me of any word of appreciation that reached her, as she also told me candidly if she heard of any criticism. She had such a big, generous mind, even condescending to give an opportunity for argument when there was any difference of opinion, and absolutely tolerant and kind when one did not agree with her.

‘She was always considerate of one’s health, and insisted that the hours laid down for work were not to be exceeded, or, if this was unavoidable, that the time must be taken off as soon as possible afterwards. She only saw difficulties to conquer them, and I well remember in one of her letters from Lazaravatz, she wrote so characteristically—“the work is most interesting, bristling with difficulties.”

‘My happiest recollection is of a visit to the Highlands, to speak at some Suffrage meetings I had arranged for her. In the train she was always busy writing, in that beautiful clear characteristic hand, like herself, triumphing over the jolting of the Highland Railway, as she did later in Serbia. In the early morning she had to catch a train at Inverness, and we went by motor from Nairn. For once the writing was laid aside, and she gave herself up to the enjoyment of the sunrise, and the beautiful lights on the Ross-shire hills, as we travelled along the shores of the Moray Firth. When the car broke down, out came the despatch case again, while the chauffeur and I put on the Stepney. There was no complaining about the lost train, a wire was sent to the committee apologising for her absence, and then she immediately turned her attention to other business.’

One who first came under her influence as a patient, and became a warm friend, gives some reminiscences. Her greeting to the elect at the beginning of the year was, ‘A good new year, and the Vote this year.’

‘I remember once, as we descended the steps of St. Giles’ after attending a service at which the Edinburgh Town Council was present, she spoke joyfully of the time coming when we, the women of Edinburgh and of Scotland, would “help to build the New Jerusalem, with the weapon ready to our hand—the Vote.”’

The year 1906 brought the Liberals into political power, and with the great wave of democratic enthusiasm which gave the Government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman an enormous majority there came other expressions of the people’s will.

The Franchise for women had hitherto been of academic interest in the community: a crank, many thought it, like total abstinence or Christian Science. The claims of women were frequently brought before Parliament by private members, and if the Bill was not ‘talked out,’ it was talked round, as one of the best jests of a Parliamentary holiday. The women who advocated it were treated with tolerance, their public advocacy was deemed a tour de force, and their portraits were always of the nature of caricatures, except those in Punch, where the opponent was caricatured, and the women immortalised.

The Liberal party found its right wing mainly composed of Labour, and Socialist members were returned to Parliament. From that section of thought sprang the militant movement, and the whole question of the enfranchisement of women took on a different aspect.

This chapter does not attempt to give a history of the ‘common cause,’ or the reasons for the rapid way it came to the front, and ranked with Ireland as among the questions which, left unsettled, became a thorn in the side of any Government that attempted to govern against, or leaving outside the expressed will of the people.

This is no place to examine the causes which, along with the militant movement, but always separated from them, poured such fresh life and vigour into the old constitutional and law-abiding effort to procure the free rights of citizenship for women.

The pace quickened to an extent which was bewildering. Where a dozen meetings a year had been the portion of many speakers, they were multiplied by the tens and scores. Organisations had to be expanded. A fighting fund collected, meetings arranged, debates were held all over the country and among all classes. A press, which had never written up the subject while its advocates were law-abiding, tumbled over each other to advertise every movement of all sections of suffragists. It must be admitted the militants gave them plenty of copy, and the constitutionalists had an uneasy sense that their stable companions would kick over the traces in some embarrassing and unexpected way on every new occasion. Still the tide flowed steadily for the principle, and those who had its guidance in Parliament and the country had to use all the strength of the movement in getting it well organised and carefully worked. Societies were federated, and the greatly growing numbers co-ordinated into a machine which could bring the best pressure to bear on Parliament. The well-planned Federation of Scottish Suffrage Societies owed much to Dr. Inglis’ gift of organisation and of taking opportunity by the hand. She was Honorary Secretary to the Scottish Federation, and in those fighting years between 1906 and 1914 she impressed herself much on its policy. In the early years of her professional life, she used gaily to forecast for herself a large and paying practice. Her patients never suffered, but she sacrificed her professional prospects in a large measure for her work for the Franchise. She gave her time freely, and she raised money at critical times by parting with what was of value and in her power to give. Perhaps, the writer may here again give her own reminiscences. Her fellowship with Dr. Inglis was all too rarely social; they met almost entirely in their suffrage work. To know Dr. Inglis at all was to know her well. The transparent sincerity and simplicity of her manner left nothing to be discovered. One felt instinctively she was a comrade one could ‘go tiger-hunting with,’ and to be in her company was to be sustained by a true helpmate. We were asked to speak together. Invited by the elect, and sometimes by the opponents to enjoy hospitality, Dr. Inglis was rarely able to come in time for the baked meats before we ascended the platform, and uttered our platitudes to rooms often empty woodyards, stuck about with a remnant of those who would be saved. She usually met us on the platform, having arrived by the last train, and obliged to leave by the first. But she never came stale or discouraged. There was always the smile at the last set-back, the ready joke at our opponents, the subtle sense that she was out to win, the compelling force of sustained effort that made at least one of her yoke-fellows ashamed of the faint heart that could never hope to win through. Sometimes we travelled back together; more often we would meet next day in St. Giles’ after the daily service, and our walk home was always a cheer. ‘Never mind’ the note to discouragement. ‘Remember this or that in our favour; our next move must be in this direction.’ And the thought was always there (if her unselfconsciousness prevented it being spoken—as one wishes to-day it had been)—‘The meeting went, because you were there and set your whole soul on “willing” it through.’

She had no sympathy with militantism. There was no better fighter with legitimate weapons, but she saw how closely the claim to do wrong that good might come was related to anarchy, and her sense of true citizenship was outraged by law-breaking which, to her clear judgment, could only retard the ultimate triumph of a cause rooted in all that was just and righteous. She was not confused by any cross-currents of admiration for individual courage and self-sacrifice, and her one desire was to see that the Federation was ‘purged’ of all those who belonged to the forces of disintegration.

She had the fruit of her political sagacity, and her fearless pursuit after integrity in deed and in word. When the moment came when she was to go to the battle fronts of the world, a succourer of many, she went in the strength of the Suffrage women of Scotland. They were her shield and buckler, and their loyal support of her work and its ideals was her exceeding great reward. Without their organised strength she could never have called into existence those units and their equipment which have justly earned the praises of nations allied in arms.

With the rise of the militant movement, the whole Suffrage cause passed through a cloud of opprobrium and almost universal objurgation. Women were all tarred with the same stick, and fell under one condemnation. It is now of little moment to recall this, except in as much as it affected Elsie Inglis. The Scottish Suffrage societies, who gave their organisation and their workers to start the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, found that the community desired to forget the unpopular Suffrage, and to remember only the Scottish Hospitals. Speakers for the work that Dr. Inglis was doing were asked to avoid ‘the common cause.’ No one who knew her would consent to deny by implication one of the deepest mainsprings of her work. The Churches were equally timid in aught that gave comfort or consolation to those who were loyal to their Christian social ideal for women. No organised society owes more to the administrative work of women than does the Christian Church throughout the world. No body of administrators have been slower to perceive that women in responsible positions would be a strength to the Church than have been the clergy of the Church. The writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin puts into the mouth of the clerical type of that day the argument that the Old Testament gave an historic basis for the enslavement of races, and St. Paul had sanctioned slavery in the New Testament. The spirit of Christianity has raised women from a ‘low estate,’ and women owe everything to the results of Christianity; but the ecclesiastical mind has never shaken off the belief that they are under a special curse from the days of Eden, and that St. Paul’s outlook on women in his day was the last revelation as to their future position in a jealously-guarded corporation. Which of us, acquainted with the Church history of our day, but remembers the General Assembly when the women missionaries were first invited to stand by their fellow-workers and be addressed by the Moderator on their labours and sufferings in a common cause? It was a great shock to the fathers and brethren that their sex should not disqualify them from standing in the Assembly, which would have more democratic weight in the visible Church on earth if some of its elected lay members were women serving in the courts of the Church. In this matter and in many others concerning women, the Church is not yet triumphant over its prejudices bedded in the geological structure of Genesis.

In all periods of the enfranchisement struggle there were individual clergy who aided women with their warm advocacy and the helpful direction of thought. Elsie Inglis was a leader of this movement in its connection with a high Christian ideal of the citizenship of women. To those who gathered in St. Margaret’s, the church of Parliament in history, to commemorate all her works begun and ended as a member of Christ’s Church here on earth, it was fitting that Bishop Gore, who had so consistently upheld the cause, should speak of her work as one who had helped to win the equality of women in a democratic, self-governing State.

This memoir would utterly fail to reproduce a picture of Dr. Inglis if it did not emphasise how her spirit was led and disciplined, tempered and steeled, through this long and fiery trial to the goal of a leading ideal. The contest trained her for her splendid achievements in overcoming all obstacles in ministering to the sufferings of nations, ‘rightly struggling to be free.’ Her friend, Miss Wright, says:—

‘We did not always agree. Many were the arguments we had with her, but she was always willing to understand another point of view and willing to allow for difference of opinion. She was very fair-minded and reasonable, and deplored the excesses of the militant suffragettes. She was in no sense a man-hater; to her the world was composed of men and women, and she thought it a mistake to exalt the one unduly over the other. She was never embittered by her struggle for the position of women. She loved the fight, and the endeavour, and to arrive at any point just meant a fresh setting forward to another further goal.

‘From her girlhood onward, her effort was to free and broaden life for other women, to make the world a better place to live in.

‘I had a letter this week from Annie Wilson, Elsie’s great friend. She says, “It seems to me Elsie’s whole life was full of championship of the weak, and she was so strong in maintaining what was right. I feel sure she has inspired many. I remember once saying in connection with some work I was going to begin, ‘I wonder if I shall be able,’ and Elsie saying in her bright way, ‘What man has done man can do.’ I am so glad that she had the opportunity of showing her great administrative capacity, and that her power is known and acknowledged. She is a great woman. I cannot tell you what it will be not to have her welcome to look forward to when I come home.”

‘Elsie had in many respects what is, perhaps wrongly, called a man’s mind. She was an Imperialist in the very best sense, and had high ideals for her country and people. She was a very womanly woman, never affecting mannish ways as a pose. If she seemed a strong-minded woman it was because she had strenuous work to do. She was never “a lone woman.” She was always one of a family, and in the heart of the family. Elsie always had the lovingest appreciation and backing from her nearest and dearest, and that a wide and varied circle. So, also, she did not need to fight for her position; it has been said of her, “Whenever she began to speak her pleasant well-bred accent and manner gained her a hearing.” She was ever a fighter, but it was because she wanted those out in the cold and darkness to come into the love and light which she herself experienced and sought after always more fully.

‘We looked forward to more frequent meetings when working days were done. Now she has gone forward to the great work beyond:

‘“Somewhere, surely, afar

In the sounding labour home vast

Of being, is practised that strength—

Zealous, beneficent, firm.”’

CHAPTER VII
THE PROFESSION AND THE FAITH

‘Run the straight race through God’s good grace,

Lift up thine eyes and seek His face;

Life with its way before us lies,

Christ is the path, and Christ the prize.’

‘Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.’

Elsie Inglis took up practice in Edinburgh, and worked in a happy partnership with the late Dr. Jessie MacGregor, until the latter left Scotland for work in America.

When the University of Edinburgh admitted women to the examinations for degrees in medicine, Dr. Inglis graduated M.B., C.M. in 1899. From that date onwards her practice, her political and suffrage work, and the founding of the Hospice in the High Street of Edinburgh, as a nursing home and maternity centre staffed by medical women, occupied a life which grew and strengthened amid so many and varied experiences.

Her father’s death deprived her of what had been the very centre and mainspring of her existence. As she records the story of his passing on, she says that she cannot imagine life without him, and that he had been so glad to see her begin her professional career. She was not one to lose her place in the stream of life from any morbid inaction or useless repining. She shared the spirit of the race from which she had sprung, a reaching forward to obtain the prize of life fulfilled with service, and she had inherited the childlike faith and confidence which inspired their belief in the Father of Spirits.

Elsie lost in her father the one who had made her the centre of his thoughts and of his most loving watchfulness. From the day that her home with him was left unto her desolate, she was to become a centre to many of her father’s wide household, and, even as she had learnt from him, she became a stay and support to many of his children’s children.

The two doctors started practice in Atholl Place, and later on they moved into 8 Walker Street, an abode which will always be associated with the name of Dr. Elsie Inglis.

Mrs. M‘Laren says:—

‘My impressions of their joint house are all pleasant ones. They got on wonderfully together, and in every thing seemed to appreciate one another’s good qualities. They were very different, and had in many ways a different outlook. I remember Jessie saying once, “Elsie is so exceptionally generous in her attitude of mind, it would be difficult not to get on with her!” They both held their own opinions on various subjects without the difference of opinion really coming between them. Elsie said once about the arrangement, “It has all the advantages of marriage without any of its disabilities.” We used always to think they did each other worlds of good. I know how I always enjoyed a visit to them if it was only for an afternoon or some weeks. There was such an air of freedom in the whole house. You did what you liked, thought what you liked, without any fear of criticism or of being misunderstood.

‘I do not know much about her practice, as medicine never interested me, but I believe at one time, before the Suffrage work engrossed her so much, she was making quite a large income.’

Professionally she suffered under two disabilities: the restricted opportunities for clinical work in the days when she was studying her profession, combined with the constant interruptions which the struggle against the medical obstructionists necessitated; secondly, the various stages in the political fight incident to obtaining that wider enfranchisement which aimed at freeing women from all those lesser disabilities which made them the helots of every recognised profession and industry.

When in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals abroad, Dr. Inglis rapidly acquired a surgical skill, under the tremendous pressure of work, which often kept her for days at the operating-table, which showed what a great surgeon she might have been, given equal advantages in the days of her peace practice.

Dr. Inglis lost no opportunity of enlarging her knowledge. She was a lecturer on Gynecology in the Medical College for Women which had been started later than Dr. Jex Blake’s school, and was on slightly broader lines. After she had started practice she went to study German clinics; she travelled to Vienna, and later on spent two months in America studying the work and methods of the best surgeons in New York, Chicago, and Rochester.

She advocated, at home and abroad, equal opportunities for work and study in the laboratories for both men and women students. She maintained that the lectures for women only were not as good as those provided for the men, and that the women did not get the opportunity of thorough laboratory practice before taking their exams. She thus came into conflict with the University authorities, who refused to accept women medical students within the University, or to recognise extra-mural mixed classes in certain subjects. Step by step Dr. Inglis fought for the students. ‘With a great price’ she might truly say she had purchased her freedom, and nothing would turn her aside. If one avenue was closed, try another. If one Principal was adamant, his day could not last for ever; prepare the way for his successor. Indomitable, unbeaten, unsoured, Dr. Inglis, with the smiling, fearless brow, trod the years till the influence of the ‘red planet Mars’ opened to her and others the gate of opportunity. She had achieved many things, and was far away from her city and its hard-earned practice when at length, in 1916, the University, under a new ‘open-minded, generous-hearted Head,’ opened its doors to women medical students.

There were other things, besides her practice, which Dr. Inglis subordinated in these years to the political enfranchisement of women. It has been shown in a previous chapter how keen were her political beliefs. She joined the Central Edinburgh Women’s Liberal Association in its earliest organised years. She acted as Vice-President in it for sixteen years, and was one of its most active members.

Mr. Gulland, the Liberal Whip, knew the value of her work, and must have had reason to respect the order in which she placed her political creed—first the citizenship of women, then the party organisation. He speaks of her fearless partisanship and aloof attitude towards all local political difficulties. An obstacle to her was a thing to be overcome, not to be sat down before. Any one in politics who sees what is right, and cannot understand any reason why the action should not be straight, rather than compromising, is a help to party agents at rare intervals; normally such minds cause anxiety. Her secretary, Miss Cunningham, says about her place in the Liberal organisation:—

‘Not only as a speaker—though as that she was invaluable—but as one who mixed freely with all our members, with her sympathy, in fact, her enthusiasm for everything affecting the good of women, she won respect and liking on every side. It was not until she became convinced that she could help forward the great cause for women better by being unattached to any party organisation that she severed her connection with the Liberal Party. Regretted as that severance was by all, we understood her point of view so well that we recognised there was no other course open to her. Her firm grasp of and clear insight into matters political made her a most valued colleague, especially in times of difficulty, when her advice was always to be relied upon.’

In 1901 she was a member of the Women’s Liberal League, a branch of the W.L.A. which split off at the time of the Boer War, in opposition to the ‘Little Englanders.’ Dr. Inglis was on its first committee, and lent her drawing-room for meetings, addressing other meetings on the Imperialist doctrines born in that war. When that phase of politics ended, the League became an educational body and worked on social and factory legislation.

Among her other enterprises was the founding of the Muir Hall of Residence for Women Students at the University. Many came up from the country, and, like herself in former days in Glasgow, had to find suitable, and in many cases uncomfortable, lodgings.

Principal Muir’s old Indian friendship with Mr. Inglis had been most helpful in former years, and now Lady Muir and other friends of the women students started a Residence in George Square for them, and Miss Robertson was appointed its first warden. Dr. Inglis was Hon. Secretary to the Muir Hall till she died, and from its start was a moving spirit in all that stood for the comfort of the students. She attended them when they were ill, and was always ready to help them in their difficulties with her keen, understanding advice. The child of her love, amid all other works, was her Maternity Hospice. Of this work Miss Mair, who was indeed ‘a nursing mother’ to so many of the undertakings of women in the healing profession, writes of Dr. Inglis’ feeling with perfect understanding:—

‘To Dr. Inglis’ clear vision, even in her early years of student life, there shone through the mists of opposition and misunderstandings a future scene in which a welcome recognition would be made of women’s services for humanity, and with a strong, glad heart she joined with other pioneers in treading “the stony way” that leads to most reforms. Once landed on the firm rock of professional recognition, Dr. Inglis set about the philanthropic task of bringing succour and helpful advice to mothers and young babies and expectant mothers in the crowded homes in and about the High Street. There, with the help of a few friends, she founded the useful little Hospice that we trust now to see so developed and extended by an appreciative public, that it will merit the honoured name “The Dr. Elsie Inglis Memorial Hospice.”

‘This little Hospice lay very near the heart of its founder—she loved it—and with her always sensitive realisation of the needs of the future, she was convinced that this was a bit of work on the right lines for recognition in years to come. Some of us can recall the kindling eye, the inspiring tones, that gave animation to her whole being when talking of her loved Hospice. She saw in it a possible future that might effect much, not only for its patients, but for generations of medical women.’

With Dr. Elsie one idea always started another, and ‘a felt want’ in any department of life always meant an instantly conceived scheme of supplying the need. Those who ‘came after’ sometimes felt a breathless wonder how ways and means could be found to establish and settle the new idea which had been evolved from the fertile brain. The Hospice grew out of the establishment of a nursing home for working women, where they could be cared for near their own homes. Through the kindness of Dr. Barbour, a house was secured at a nominal rent in George Square, and opened in 1901. That sphere of usefulness could be extended if a maternity home could be started in a poorer district. Thus the Hospice in the High Street was opened in 1904. Dr. Inglis devoted herself to the work. An operating theatre and eight beds were provided. The midwifery department grew so rapidly that after a few years the Hospice became a centre, one of five in Scotland, for training nurses for the C.M.B. examination.

Dr. Inglis looked forward to a greater future for it in infant welfare work, and she always justified the device of the site as being close to where the people lived, and in air to which they were accustomed. Trained district nurses visited the people in their own homes, and in 1910 there were more cases than nurses to overtake them. In that year the Hospice was amalgamated with Bruntsfield Hospital; medical, surgical, and gynecological cases were treated there, while the Hospice was devoted entirely to maternity and infant welfare cases.

Dr. Inglis’ ‘vision’ was nearly accomplished when she had a small ward of five beds for malnutrition cases, a baby clinic, a milk depot, health centres, and the knowledge that the Hospice has the distinction of being the only maternity centre run by women in Scotland. This affords women students opportunities denied to them in other maternity hospitals.

A probationer in that Hospice says:—

‘Dr. Inglis’ idea was that everything, as far as possible, should be made subservient to the comfort of the patients. This was always considered when planning the routine. She disapproved of the system prevalent in so many hospitals of rousing the patients out of sleep in the small hours of the morning in order to get through the work of the wards. She would not have them awakened before 6 A.M., and she instituted a cup of tea before anything else was done. To her nurses she was very just and appreciative of good work, and, if complaints were made against any one, the wrongdoing had to be absolutely proved before she would take action. She also insisted on the nurses having adequate time off, and that it should not be infringed upon.’

These, in outline, are the interests which filled the years after Dr. Elsie began her practice. Of her work among the people living round her Hospice, it is best told in the words of those who watched for her coming, and blessed the sound of her feet on their thresholds. Freely she gave them of her best, and freely they gave her the love and confidence of their loyal hearts.

Mrs. B. had been Dr. Inglis’ patient for twenty years, and she had also attended her mother and grandmother. Of several children one was called Elsie Maud Inglis, and the child was christened in the Dean Church by Dr. Williamson, who had known Dr. Inglis as a child in India. The whole family seem to have been her charge, for when Mrs. B.’s husband returned from the South African War, Dr. Inglis fought the War Office for nine months to secure him a set of teeth, and, needless to say, after taking all the trouble entailed by a War Office correspondence, she was successful. A son fought in the present war, and when Dr. Inglis saw the death of a Private B., she sent a telegram to the War Office to make sure it was not the son of Mrs. B. She would never take any fees from this family. On one occasion Mr. B. gave her some feathers he had brought home from Africa. She had them put in a new hat she had got for a wedding, and came round before she went to the festival to show them to the donor. Her cheery ways ‘helped them all,’ and when a child of the family broke its leg, and was not mending all round in the Infirmary, Dr. Inglis was asked to go and see her, and the child from then ‘went forrit.’