Digital Commons Network^™

"Between The Two Great Battlefields:" Scottish Medical Women's Encounters With The Eastern Front, Fiona Gale Holter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the role of medical women on the battlefront during the First World War. Using the Scottish Women’s Hospitals as a case study, it argues that frontline medical women occupied a liminal space on the fronts. As both witnesses and participants, they confronted wounds, trauma, and violence wrought by total war. Since this was typically reserved for the combatant, contemporary notions of gender refused to acknowledge medical women’s authority within the war story. This dissertation employs medical women’s wartime experiences to argue that their war story redefines our understandings of combatancy, allowing us to see it as a …