Determined to serve: the little-known story of Mary De Garis

Volume 11 Number 4 April 13 - May 10 2015

Mary De Garis (1881- 1963) and other Melbourne Hospital residents, 1905-1906; photograph,; 31.5 x 36.8 cm; MHM04368
Mary De Garis (1881- 1963) and other Melbourne Hospital residents, 1905-1906; photograph,; 31.5 x 36.8 cm; MHM04368
When the Great War broke out, women doctors who offered to serve were famously told to “go home and sit still”. But a group of remarkable women refused, making their own way to the front and forging a significant yet little-known slice of feminist history. Michelle Moo recounts two of their stories.

In 1914 Mary De Garis was the resident doctor in Tibooburra, one of the most remote outback towns in NSW, close to the edge of the Strzelecki desert, when she heard of a war in Europe and resolved to enlist.
She had arrived in the arid farming community three years earlier, via the grazing town of Muttaburra, leaving the comfort of her affluent background to follow the rare opportunities for women doctors.
When Britain declared war on Germany, she had been engaged to Colin Thomson – a local farmer and captain of the cricket team – for 10 days.
As the war broke on a Europe that could not have envisaged the devastation of trench warfare, De Garis immediately understood the demands it would make on her vocation.
The war was a call to patriotic duty, but it was also an extraordinary test of the limits of the profession, and would elicit vast advances in medicine, including in plastic surgery and psychiatry. Innovations in the treatment of wounds, broken bones and disease were all to emerge from the ruins.
But De Garis also considered what the war might mean for women doctors, who in 1914 were still marginalised within the profession and society at large. She wrote in a letter: “…if the war continues, the need for doctors will be so great that women will have a chance of being accepted and given military status for it”.
Roused to serve, the newly engaged couple enlisted and Thomson sailed for Egypt, headed for Gallipoli. De Garis’ enlistment to the Australian Army Medical Corps, however, was flatly refused.
In the sweeping social changes of the early 20th century, great forces were colliding. Women doctors such as Mary De Garis were drawn to war out of patriotic duty, but also out of ambitions for equality that arose out of the struggle for women’s equal rights.
De Garis had enrolled in medicine at the University of Melbourne in 1900, becoming only the 31st woman to do so. The path to admission for women had been won several years earlier by two young women, Helen Sexton and Lilian Alexander, who garnered support through the press and family connections, securing the University Council’s approval in 1887. At a time when women did not yet have the vote, seven women enrolled, entering a profession that was generally seen as too difficult, too unseemly and too powerful for women.
In June 1916, De Garis sailed to London – her revolver packed – in case her fiancé, deployed to the Western Front after having survived Gallipoli, was wounded and repatriated to England. It was there, working in a hospital in London, that she learnt of his death at Pozières on 4 August 1916.
Rather than return home, a grief-stricken De Garis was mobilised and joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), founded by suffragist and activist Dr Elsie Inglis. Formed to provide female-staffed mobile medical units, when they offered their services to the British Army early in the war they were famously told to “go home and sit still”.
The agitation in that phrase tells us much about the attitudes to women doctors, and revealed the deep mistrust of the suffragist movement. But there was also something deeply psychological in that agitation, central to the war effort: war was men’s business, and men’s motivation in risking their lives pivoted around women’s vulnerability, their need for protection. Giving women authority disrupted this relation.
It may be one reason why the French military establishment was able to accept the SWH, but not their own women doctors. Like France, other allied forces embraced the SWH and 14 mobile hospitals were set up near battlefields in France, Serbia, Greece and Russia, with women recruited from all over the empire.
Mary joined the SWH unit operating in Ostrovo, northern Macedonia, under the Serbian army on the Balkan (Eastern) front, taking over in 1917 as chief medical officer from fellow Australian Dr Agnes Bennet who was struck down with severe malaria. It was a 200-bed hospital, operated by 50 women, surrounded by camps of soldiers from the Serbian, French, Russian, Italian and Greek armies.
It was run as a military hospital, with discipline, curfews and mail censoring. Women did every aspect of the work: as surgeons, nurses, ambulance drivers, mechanics, sanitation workers, cooks and orderlies. It was close to the front and De Garis performed difficult surgery in all weather, battling flies and wasps, typhoid, dysentery and malaria. At Ostrovo between 1916-1919, 1084 operations were performed involving amputations, bomb and bullet wounds, compound fractures, hernias, and the removal of foreign bodies.
Miles Franklin, the celebrated Australian writer, worked as an orderly and cook in Ostrovo and struck up a friendship with De Garis. In an unpublished manuscript of her war memoirs she wrote:
A story of the sangfroid of Dr De Garis was current. Once in the early days of the unit, while a serious operation was proceeding in the little operating tent of the advanced dressing station, the bombs began to rain. The men assistants promptly disappeared to their funk holes, but Doctor continued her operation, occasionally remarking very politely to the Sister who stayed with her, that she was sorry, she supposed the Sister would like to have a look at what was going on outside, but the patient had to be attended to or he would bleed to death.
The extraordinary strength of character required was perhaps not surprising in a woman who had gone against cultural mores, fought for equal rights, and was in effect a pioneer even before war broke out.
After the war Mary De Garis was awarded the Serbian Order of St Sava III class as well as British medals for her contribution in a place of peril and medical urgency. She was not recognised in Australia.
Mary De Garis was not the only Australian women doctor who served in the Great War, others included Dr Rachel Champion, Dr Hilda Bull Esson, and Dr Vera Scantlebury Brown from the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney graduates Dr Laura Foster, Dr Isobel Ormiston and Dr Elsie Dalyell, and Dr Pheobe Chapple from the University of Adelaide.
If the Australian Army – which would wait until 1943 to appoint its first woman doctor – was not kind to women doctors, history has not been much kinder and they have been overlooked.
Official records of their work are scant, and researchers have had to piece together histories, relying on archives, letters, family collections and other evidence. But researchers on whose work this article has relied for information – particularly Dr Ruth Lee who has written the Mary de Garis biography Woman War Doctor, the Life of Mary De Garis, and Dr Heather Sheard, an expert on women doctors in WW1 –– have done extensive work to finally bring these stories to light.
The exhibition Compassion and courage: Doctors and Dentists at War, is showing at the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne.
museum.medicine.unimelb.edu.au/