The quiet heroics of a woman doctor on a WWI battlefield #CarryGobySeanKellz #FutureGroupNG via @i_amreginaldjr

THE secret courage of one of the first women doctors to serve on First World War battlefields has been uncovered after three-and-a-half years of painstaking research by her granddaughter.

Dr Isabella Stenhouse is centre - in the white hat - pictured while serving in Malta[BPM]

There would have been wounds such as gas gangrene that were something doctors had never seen before

Dr Isabella Stenhouse never spoke or wrote of her heroism and left behind only surgical instruments and a string of beads given to her by a German prisoner-of-war.

So her granddaughter Katrina Kirkwood trawled through archives of 20 museums to trace the story.

Now, 100 years after Isabella took up her first posting in France, Cardiff-based artist Katrina has revisited the hospital where her granny worked alongside Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Marie Curie.

Straight out of medical school in her home city of Edinburgh, Isabella saved soldiers’ lives in operating theatres at the Anglo-Ethiopian Red Cross Hospital, at St-Valery-sur-Somme.

Katrina said: “They were very basic facilities. In Edinburgh, she had state-of-the-art medical training, so it would have been a real change.

“There would have been wounds such as gas gangrene that were something doctors had never seen before and they would have had to work out how to deal with them.”

Further hampering the difficult working conditions, the doctors had to rely on erratic gas lamps to light operating theatres.

Also, as the hospital imported all medical supplies, there were severe shortages when lines were closed.

 

“In the hospital in France, they did not have electric lights,” said Katrina. “You would have wounded men arriving at 11 at night with no lights.

“There was a fire at the hospital in 1915 and, as it was the Somme, they had to go hand-to-hand with buckets to put it out.”

The British Army would not have women surgeons looking after its men so Isabella treated only French troops until, overrun with casualties in 1916, the British relented.

Isabella was also posted to Malta, where Katrina visited the hospital in which her grandmother worked.

“Isabella didn’t talk about what she did during the war,” she said. “The women were so busy, very few had time to write down anything.”

Now Katrina hopes her book, The Mystery Of Isabella And The String Of Beads, can be published.