YOUR article about the prospect of the first female inductee into the Wallace Monument's Hall of Heroes (“Exhibition pays tribute to women as public votes for heroes’ inductee”, The Herald, February 21) cites Dr Elsie Inglis as one of the candidates for whom visitors are being given the chance to vote. You refer to her as a suffragette. She was not. She was a leading suffragist. While active in the cause of votes for women Elsie had, to quote her biographer Lady Frances Balfour, "no sympathy with militantism ... her sense of true citizenship was outraged by law-breaking".
Nor, as stated, was she founder of the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. That was Sophia Jex-Blake (in 1887). Elsie had been a student there, one of the first to benefit from the trail so courageously blazed by Dr Jex-Blake. In mid-course, however, Elsie had aligned herself with some students rebelling against what they regarded as petty rules and the autocratic ways of Jex-Blake, the School's Dean. Elsie became a driving force behind the founding of the rival Medical College for Women, which was in Edinburgh's Chambers Street. This, and other new alternative provision for women to study medicine, eventually forced Sophia to close her school and sever her connection with Edinburgh; apart, that is, from her memories of Elsie Inglis – whom she had grown to loathe.
Dr Inglis was admirable in many ways because of her work with Edinburgh's poor and in the thick of First World War hostilities. But she had her dark side.
CSA Lincoln,
Pentland Drive, Edinburgh.
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