No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I

No Man’s Land tells how women’s suffrage, the demand for women’s rights, was temporarily back-burnered during the years of the First World War. Her book draws together the accomplishments of a military hospital London operated almost exclusively by women and chronicles the successive battles in France that sent thousands of wounded soldiers from the battlefield to the hospital. The author highlights the two doctors, serving as Commanding Officers, known to their staff simply as the ‘COs:’ Louisa Garrett Anderson, responsible for surgery on hundreds of patients, many who arrived severely injured, and Flora Murray Flurry, charged with multiple tasks to keep the hospital running smoothly.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s battle to achieve the right to vote and further parity with men was no less intense and physically violent than sectors of the community that were reviled in the intervening year against people of color, blacks, gays, and immigrants. Murray and Anderson were active suffragettes, their cause ultimately more rewarded than some others.

Women were accepted at very few medical schools. As doctors, when most who graduated were permitted to care for only women and children in a hospital setting, Murray and Anderson were pioneers. The book describes the persistent conflicts with military and political opponents who were unable to accept women’s ability to carry out all necessary medical, administrative, and clerical roles.

Moore provides a rewarding conclusion telling how the two doctors became life partners, and what befell others whose services were valued. The book is riveting no matter whether one admires or even despises the causes it depicts.