Indeed, for Elsie Inglis herself the High Street Hospice, a surgical and gynaecological centre that she started for the poor women of Edinburgh in 1904, was how she would have been remembered if it had not been for the advent of the First World War.

Life was hard for a woman at the turn of the 19th century in terms of freedoms and rights. They did not have the vote, they had no rights over their money or property, there were few opportunities for study, they could not stay in hospital or have an operation without their husband’s consent and they had a legal obligation to follow their husband wherever he chose to live. Elsie’s mother, Harriet, had left her six eldest children in Britain, either at boarding school or with relatives, while she dutifully followed her husband John Inglis back to India. This was not unusual amongst expatriates, and employees of the East India Company were no exceptions. The devoted pair from Scotland, who had met and married in India, were equally united in their strong Presbyterian faith.  

So Elsie was, in effect, the eldest of the Inglis’s second family of three when she was born at the Himalayan Hill Station of Naini Tal in 1864. The children accompanied their parents on long arduous expeditions around India. Harriet wrote of Elsie that ‘she was accommodating herself to circumstances, watching the trees, sleeping under them, and the jolliest little traveller I ever saw’. Her sister Eva remembers early games that involved painting red spots on all their dolls so that Elsie could ‘cure’ them of the measles with gruesome potions and pills. By the age of 13, on their long voyage back to their native Scotland, Elsie was already busying herself looking after other sick and ailing children on the boat.

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