The London School of Medicine for Women opened in 1874 to train women as doctors. While they could study medicine, they weren’t allowed to practise until the Royal Free Hospital became the first British institute to admit women, giving them valuable real-life clinical experience.
Flora trained at the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women and qualified as a doctor in 1905. She worked as a medical officer and anaesthetist and supported suffragettes recovering from hunger strikes.
In 1912 she founded the Women’s Hospital for Children in London with Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson to provide healthcare for working class children in north west London.
Women doctors were still excluded from many medical roles. During WW1, offers of help from female doctors were turned down by the government. Flora and Louisa founded the Women’s Hospital Corps, went to Paris and set up a hospital in the Hotel Claridge to treat wounded soldiers.
The success of the Women’s Hospital Corps led to the British war office asking Flora and Louisa to set up a similar hospital in London to treat soldiers. They set up the Endell Street Military Hospital, the first in the UK established for men staffed entirely by women.
The hospital, where Flora was doctor in charge and Louisa the chief surgeon, had the motto “deeds not words”; in a precursor to what we now know as holistic healthcare, they sought to care for patients’ minds as well as their physical wounds.
As well as clinical practice, Endell Street doctors carried out a significant amount of clinical and laboratory research, with seven papers being published in The Lancet. In 1917, Flora and Louisa were awarded CBEs for their work and medical efforts during the war.
After the war, Flora and Louisa lived together in Penn, Buckinghamshire until Flora’s death in 1923 in a Hampstead nursing home. Louisa was by her side.
Flora is buried in a churchyard in Penn. Louisa lived for a further twenty years and died in 1943 aged 70. The headstone on Flora’s grave commemorates them both and includes the declaration: “We have been gloriously happy”.
