File:An operation for appendicitis at the Military Hospital Wellcome V0017561.jpg

An operation for appendicitis at the Military Hospital, Endell Street, London. Chalk drawing by Francis Dodd, 1917. Francis Dodd lived through the Second World War, lost his wife in 1948 but remarried almost immediately. Then, five weeks after his wedding in January 1949, he gassed himself and died in his home in Blackheath, a Royal Academician and a much admired elder statesman among practitioners of the art of the portrait.

Endell Street, named on the label, is in Covent Garden, London, and it has a long history as a street of hospitals. On the east side of the street there is a substantial Victorian building called the Hospital. That building is now a media club and restaurant run by Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Dave Stewart (former pop singer), but until 1992 it was St Paul's Hospital, a urological hospital in which the first kidney dialysis in the UK was carried out in 1961. However, there had been a hospital on that site long before: from 1749 to 1913 it was occupied by the British Lying-in Hospital. A few steps to the north was the infirmary of the local workhouse, the Workhouse for the Parish of St Giles, which from 1913 to 1919 contained the hospital depicted in Dodd's sketch, the Endell Street Military Hospital. The building has since been demolished and replaced with a block of flats.

This was no ordinary hospital: it was staffed entirely by women, and since it was a military hospital, all the patients were men. It was founded in 1915 by a group of public-spirited women who were determined to prove that women could run hospitals, whether as medical, management, or ancillary staff, just as well as men. Two of the founders of the hospital: Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray, were members of the suffragette movement. Though the hospital was set up at the invitation of Sir Alfred Keogh, Director of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), other members of the RAMC did not share his confidence and predicted that the hospital would have to close in six months. In the event, Garrett Anderson and her staff vindicated Keogh's confidence: the hospital flourished throughout the war and closed in December 1919, when its work came to an end.

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