Elsie Inglis | Page 9

again, Elsie Inglis's
courage and energy made themselves felt. She desired a larger field for
the usefulness of the institution, and proposed to enlarge the hospital to
such an extent that its accommodation for patients should be doubled.
A colleague writes: "Once again the number must be doubled, always
with the same idea in view--i.e., to insure the possibilities for gaining
experience for women doctors. Once again the committee was carried

along on a wave of unprecedented effort to raise money. An eager band
of volunteers was organized, among them some of her own students.
Bazaars and entertainments were arranged, special appeals were issued,
and the necessary money was found, and the alterations carried out. It
was never part of Dr. Inglis's policy to wait till the money came in. She
always played a bold game, and took risks which left the average
person aghast, and in the end she invariably justified her action by
accomplishing the task which she set herself, and, at times it must be
owned, which she set an all too unwilling committee! But for that
breezy and invincible faith and optimism the Scottish Women's
Hospitals would never have taken shape in 1914."
Dr. Inglis's plea for the Units of the Scottish Women's Hospital was
always that they might be sent "where the need was greatest." In these
years of work before the war the same motive, to supply help where it
was most needed, seems to have guided her private practice, for we
read: "Dr. Inglis was perhaps seen at her best in her dispensary work,
for she was truly the friend and the champion of the working woman,
and especially of the mother in poor circumstances and struggling to
bring up a large family. Morrison Street Dispensary and St. Anne's
Dispensary were the centre of this work, and for years to come mothers
will be found in this district who will relate how Dr. Inglis put at their
service the best of her professional skill and, more than that, gave them
unstintedly of her sympathy and understanding."
Dr. Wallace Williamson, of St. Giles's Cathedral, writing of her after
her death, is conscious also of this impulse always manifesting itself in
her to work where difficulties abounded. He points out: "Of her strictly
professional career it may be truly said that her real attraction had been
to work among the suffering poor.... She was seen at her best in hospice
and dispensary, and in homes where poverty added keenness to pain.
There she gave herself without reserve. Questions of professional
rivalry or status of women slipped away in her large sympathy and
helpfulness. Like a truly 'good physician,' she gave them from her own
courage an uplift of spirit even more valuable than physical cure. She
understood them and was their friend. To her they were not merely
patients, but fellow-women. It was one of her great rewards that the

poor folk to whom she gave of her best rose to her faith in them,
whatever their privations or temptations. Her relations with them were
remote from mere routine, and so distinctively human and real that her
name is everywhere spoken with the note of personal loss. Had not the
wider call come, this side of her work awaited the fulfilment of ever
nobler dreams."
She was loved and appreciated as a doctor not only by her poorer
patients, but by those whom she attended in all ranks of society.
Of her work as an operator and lecturer two of her colleagues say:
"It was a pleasure to see Dr. Inglis in the operating-theatre. She was
quiet, calm, and collected, and never at a loss, skilful in her
manipulations, and able to cope with any emergency."
"As a lecturer she proved herself clear and concise, and the level of her
lectures never fell below that of the best established standards. Students
were often heard to say that they owed to her a clear and a practical
grasp of a subject which is inevitably one of the most important for
women doctors."
Should it be asked what was the secret of her success in her work, the
answer would not be difficult to find. A clear brain she had, but she had
more. She had vision, for her life was based on a profound trust in God,
and her vision was that of a follower of Christ, the vision of the
kingdom of heaven upon earth. This was the true source of that
remarkable optimism which carried her over difficulties deemed by
others insurmountable. Once started in pursuit of an object, she was
most reluctant to abandon it, and her gaze was so keenly fixed on the
end in view that it must be admitted she was found by some to be
"ruthless" in the way in which