| Biography | The Scottish Women's Hospitals' Memorial Association (SWHMA) was created in memory of the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH), a First World War hospital organisation run entirely by women.
When hostilities broke out in 1914 Dr Elsie Inglis, a prominent Edinburgh GP, offered the services of a women-run hospital unit to the War Office, but was turned down without ceremony. Undeterred, she formed the 'Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service', with the support of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. The SWH opened its first hospital at the 13th century Abbaye de Royaumont in northern France, under the French Red Cross, and included on its staff a number of women who had been active in the women's suffrage movement. By the time the war ended Royaumont had 600 beds, and the SWH had equipped a further 13 medical units entirely staffed by women for service in mainland France, Corsica, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia. In 1915 one of their Serbian units was captured by invading Austrian and German forces, and the SWH founder Elsie Inglis was among those captured. With the help of American diplomats, the British authorities were eventually able to secure their release. In August 1916 the London Society for Women's Suffrage financed a Scottish Women's Hospitals unit in Russia, and a Serbian official who saw the work of the unit said "No wonder England is a great country if the women are like that." Elsie Inglis died in 1917, but her organisation continued to operate on the Continent until the end of 1919, after which it was slowly wound up, the remaining funds being used to build the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Scottish Women's Hospitals' Memorial Association was founded in 1921 by Professor Louise McIlroy, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Royal Free Hospital who had run two SWH units during the war. Many of the women doctors who served with the SWH had trained at the Royal Free. The Association's aim was to raise money to endow beds at the hospital in memory of the work of the SWH. In 1928 it raised £3,500 through a special appeal to build and equip a maternity ward of eight beds in the new Queen Mary Wing, to be named 'The Scottish Women's Hospitals' Memorial Ward.' The SWHMA also contributed to the support of a maternity clinic opened by the Royal Free in 1925 in the Essex Road, Islington; it ceased to operate in the 1950s.
Minutes of the Executive Committee of the SWHMA are held in the Royal Free Hospital Archives, and there are summaries of its work in the Annual Reports of the hospital. The principal records of the SWH are in the Mitchell Library, in Glasgow; The Women's Library holds the papers of the organisation's London Committee, and there is also SWH material in the Women's Work Collection at the Imperial War Museum.
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