ENDELL STREET

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, sub-titled 'The Women Who Ran Britain's Trailblazing Military Hospital', Moore is superb at describing the medical advances that resulted in seven research papers by Endell Street doctors being published in The Lancet, among the first ever by women. It is impossible not to love the Suffragette surgeons as they fought the wounded abroad and for women's rights at home, and luckily for us this spectacular story fell into the hands of one of our finest biographers. She tells the forgotten and inspiring story of a London hospital during the First World War which was staffed entirely by women. At this time, the Suffragettes suspended their campaigning and joined the war effort. For pioneering Suffragette doctors and life partners Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson that meant moving to France, where they set up two small hospitals amidst fierce opposition. Their medical and organisational skills were so impressive that in 1915 Flora and Louisa were asked by the War Ministry to return to London and establish a new military hospital in a vast and derelict old workhouse in Covent Garden's Endell Street. There they created a 573-bed hospital staffed from top to bottom by female surgeons, doctors and nurses, which received 26,000 wounded men over the next four years. The book celebrates an extraordinary group of groundbreaking women who challenged and changed Britain's medical establishment and this is an extraordinary story, beautifully told. 376pp, colour and archive photos. Paperback.