Great mainbodytext - Elsie Inglis

When one thinks of war heroes, the image conjured up is rarely that of a stiff Victorian matron in long black skirts. Unless, of course, you're a bit weird or kinky that way.

But then, Elsie Maud Inglis was a truly remarkable women, a war heroine and peacetime heroine all wrapped up in one whalebone corset.

Born in India, her family returned to Edinburgh after her father's retirement from the East India Company in 1878 and after excelling at school she chose to study medicine (in Edinburgh, Belfast and Glasgow), qualifying at Glasgow in 1892, with a special interest in surgery.

Her choice of career path astonished many, for the simple reason that women surgeons in those days were about as rare as Archbishops in a Masonic Lodge. Women had only recently been allowed to study medicine and there was still much bitterness and resentment from a doctoring fraternity who stubbornly clung to the belief that nursing was the absolute limit of a lady's medical abilities in or out of the operating theatre.

Elsie wasn't one to let a little thing like prejudice get in her way though and, cocking a huge snook at the medical establishment, she proceeded to help establish only the second ever women's medical school in Edinburgh (the first had closed) which opened the surgery door to many more of her sex.

She became surgeon at Bruntsfield Hospital, but her continued experience of prejudice from her male colleagues combined with a pitiful lack of adequate maternity facilities drove her in 1901 to establish a maternity hospital staffed entirely by women. It later became known as the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, or to generations of Edinburgh mums, just plain affectionately as "Elsie's".

Her fight for equal rights for women wasn't just confined to medical matters, however, and in 1906 Elsie founded the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation, for which she worked tirelessly.

During a Federation committee meeting in 1914, the idea arose of sending mobile surgical units staffed by women out to the great war in Europe, and Elsie was the driving force behind the organisation of these units, the first of which left for France later that year, and for Serbia in 1915.

Not content with a purely administrative role at home, Elsie took herself to the front lines in Serbia in 1915, working in almost impossible conditions with her unit being constantly pushed back by advancing Austrian forces.

She was captured and subsequently repatriated some months later in 1916 but by the beginning of the following year, undaunted by her experience, she was back at the front, this time in Russia, helping to treat wounded Serbs.

Her dedication to the task was total and made Florence Nightingale look like a part-time care assistant in comparison. The heavy, relentless workload allied with the freezing cold conditions and lack of proper clothing and food combined to drain her energy and break her health, and she returned to Britain to recuperate but died the day after landing at Newcastle, in November 1917.

Her body was brought back to Edinburgh and buried in the Dean cemetery.

She lived just long enough to see women (over the age of 30) be given the vote for the first time, but tragically not long enough to ever exercise that basic democratic right herself.

After her death, Winston Churchill grandly proclaimed that Elsie Inglis and her heroic medical staff would "shine forever in history".

Sadly, but not entirely surprisingly, she is now all but forgotten, even in the history books.

Ain't that just the way.