01/09/2026
🩺🕰️ Then & Now: An A-Z of Edinburgh medicine🕰️🩺
Taking you from A-Z, we’re exploring Edinburgh’s rich medical history, uncovering historic hospitals, buildings and locations, and what they are used for today.
H is for the Hospice
Elsie Inglis was one of the first female medical students to graduate from Edinburgh in 1899. That year she set up a practice called ‘The Hospice’ in George Square for the care of poor women providing mainly Gynaecological services.
The Hospice moved to the Royal Mile and merged with the Bruntsfield Hospital in 1907.
Elsie became a suffragette leader and during the first World War she fundraised and formed the ‘Scottish Women’s Hospitals’ with a plan to deliver medical care to soldiers in the field.
The British Army were uninterested and told Elsie to ‘go home and sit still’. However, Elsie persevered and sent units to France, Serbia and Russia.
Remarkably, over 1000 women served with the Scottish Women’s Hospital over the course of the First World War with a number of these being medical students often officially functioning as ‘orderlies’ but requiring to act up as required. They gained excellent clinical experience, albeit in difficult conditions and would help with post op care including wound dressings, assist in surgeries and help manage infectious diseases outbreaks.
As well as dealing with thousands of battle injuries the women also faced many cases of typhus, yet despite this they still managed to conduct ground-breaking research into the diagnosis of gas gangrene by x-ray.
Elsie sadly died while returning from Serbia at the end of the war in 1917.
The Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital was opened in her memory in 1925 next to Holyrood Park. It had 82 beds and provided modern maternity care with countless Edinburgh ‘Elsie’s’ being born there and many mothers choosing the smaller, more community orientated feel of the Elsie Inglis compared to Simpson’s.
The hospital was closed in 1988 and became a care home.
Image credit: Lothian Health Services Archive
