** This book has been listed by HarperCollins Australia as one of the ‘best of 2025’, and you can buy the ebook/Kindle edition of The Surgeon Of Royaumont for only $4.99 on Amazon until December 31 **
You’ve probably never heard of Royaumont Abbey. In January 1915, on the Western Front, it became a battlefield hospital staffed entirely by women.
Royaumont Abbey Hospital, the largest of the so called “Scottish Women’s Hospitals,” treated over 10,000 allied casualties during World War I.
Among its staff were Australian women, including Miss Millicent Armstrong (later awarded the Croix de Guerre) and Dr Elsie Dalyell – a brilliant bacteriologist from Sydney.
In total, more than a dozen Australian women doctors, rejected by the Australian Army as being “too illogical or hysterical” to serve, instead found positions with our allies.
Some, worked in British or French units like as, Dr (Majeure) Helen Sexton (awarded the Médaille de Reconnaissance Française) and Dr (Major) Phoebe Chapple (awarded the Military Medal).
Others, including Dr Vera Scantelbury (-Brown), served at London’s Endell St Military Hospital– a fully funded War Office hospital also staffed entirely by women.
Patients Arriving By Mule
On the Eastern Front, Dr Mary de Garis, Dr Lilian Violet Cooper and Dr Agnes Bennett, (each awarded Orders of St. Sava) provided the only hospital the 3rd Serbian Army during the bitter winter of 1916.
It humbles me that, almost a century before I served as an Army surgeon in Afghanistan, Australian women served in battlefield hospitals, often working under in makeshift facilities.
While casualties in Afghanistan arrived by helicopter to a ballistic-protected facility, Dr Cooper’s patients in Serbia arrived by mule – after rough journeys with no pain relief. She performed amputations in sub-zero temperatures, under canvas, with patients on straw litters, and within range of enemy guns.
Despite experiencing my own “endless day” after a suicide bombing in Tarin Kowt, I cannot comprehend the scale of what these women faced at Royaumont or the harrowing conditions during the Battle of the Somme, described by Dr Dalyell: “The incessant thunder and boom of the great guns had never been silent for days…. Trains were arriving from the Somme in one long stream… over a hundred cases over the first 24 hours of that nightless week.”
The Women Who Inspired The Surgeon Of Royaumont
These are the remarkable women who have inspired “The Surgeon of Royaumont.”
In this fictional account, the protagonist, Dr Clara Heywood, is a composite character – drawn from many of their experiences.
Dr Scantlebury’s diaries – preserved in the University of Melbourne Archives – chronicle her struggle with military protocols, power dynamics in a hospital run entirely by women, and her anxiety about mastering unfamiliar surgical techniques.
Known at Endell St as “the little Lieutenant,” Scantlebury’s own words: “At present my mind is a confusion of military etiquette and rules …I am not at all keen on military surgery but suppose I will get used to it and do it better than at present but I think it is horrible”, mirror the fictional Clara’s development from a naïve surgeon to a mature and capable woman, who must master both the technical and ethical challenges of war surgery. Scantlebury’s detailed surgical sketches of shoulder traction systems inform the plot, as does Dr Lilian Cooper’s experience with battlefield amputations and Dr Elsie Dalyell’s expertise with gas gangrene.
In the official records housed within the Australian War Memorial, there are few traces of these women. Denied the ability to serve in Australian uniforms, their rank was often honorary and recorded in “Special Books of Service” rather than being gazetted. Consequently, they had no entitlement to official pensions or recognition and their service has been largely overlooked.
But these are women who have shown us that gallantry is not the sole domain of men. Women who remind us that beyond the familiar figures cast in bronze or stained glass there are other narratives of Australian’s experiences of war – and we are richer for sharing them.
Their stories matter, their lives matter, and they have much to teach us still.
Dr. Susan J. Neuhaus AM CSC is a surgeon, former Colonel in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, and Member of Council of the Australian War Memorial. She is the co-author of “Not for Glory: A Century of Service by Medical Women to the Australian Army and Its Allies” and the recently released novel, “The Surgeon of Royaumont”.