Mona Chalmers Watson

Dr Mona Chalmers Watson
A half length portrait of Chalmers Watson, wearing the uniform of Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps.
Born	Alexandra Mary Campbell Geddes (1872-05-31)31 May 1872 India
Died	Farnsham, Rolvenden, Kent, England
Occupation	Physician Nutritionist Head, Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (during World War I)

Dr Alexandra Mary Chalmers Watson CBE, MD (née Geddes; 31 May 1872 - 7 August 1936), known as Mona Chalmers Watson, was a Scottish physician and head of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. The first woman to receive an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh, she helped found the Elsie Inglis Hospital for Women, was the first president of the Edinburgh Women's Citizen Association, a staff physician and later senior physician at the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, and co-edited the Encyclopaedia Medica with her husband, Douglas Chalmers Watson. At the time of her death in 1936, she was president of the Medical Women's Foundation, having been elected May 1935.

Early life and family

Alexandra Mary Campbell Geddes was born in India on 31 May 1872, the daughter of Auckland Campbell Geddes (1831–1908), a civil engineer, and Christina Helen MacLeod Geddes (née Anderson; 1850–1914). Chalmers Watson was to be the eldest of five children in the Geddes family; from 1888-1890 she was educated at St Leonard's School in St Andrews, Scotland. When She turned her focus towards the study of medicine, it was the latest in a lengthy familial interest in the pursuit: not only had her mother supported Christian Guthrie Wright and Louisa Stevenson in the foundation of the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (later Queen Margaret University), but she had also been an early campaigner on behalf of the cause of medical education for women. Through her mother Chalmers Watson also claimed kinship to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in England, and her maternal aunt, Mary Marshall (née Anderson) had been one of the original women admitted to study medicine alongside Sophia Jex-Blake at the University of Edinburgh in 1871, later qualifying in Paris.

Education and early career

Chalmers Watson began her medical education at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1891, graduating MBChM from the University of Edinburgh in 1896. After her graduation, she spent a year in London working as a physician at the Maternity District Association at Plaistow; she also spent six months working at Dr Barnardo's Holmes in Kent.

Her experience working in Plaistow, where her record consisted of more than 1000 confinements with a mortality rate of just over 1 per 1000, informed the topic of her MD thesis when she returned to Edinburgh the next year. Chalmers Watson obtained her M.D. on 30 July 1898 from the University of Edinburgh's Medical College, the first woman to do so; fellow University of Edinburgh alumna Jessie MacLaren MacGregor would not receive her M.D. until the following year.

The same day that she received her M.D., Mona Geddes became Dr Mona Chalmers Watson, marrying Dr Douglas Chalmers Watson that afternoon; she had delayed the wedding until she could write M.D. after her name. The two would have two sons together, Rupert and Irvine. After their marriage, Douglas and Mona set up a private practice together in Edinburgh at 11 Walker St, which they shared until 1914.

The Chalmers Watsons also edited the Encyclopaedia Medica, a fifteen volume work the first edition of which appeared in 1900. As well as helping edit the encyclopaedia, she had contributed an article on invalid feeding. She would publish a further two books with him over their careers, Food and Feeding in Health and Disease in 1910 and The Book of Diet in 1913. While the two ran their practice, Chalmers Watson also worked at the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children; she had been appointed to the medical staff in 1900, eventually becoming a senior physician.

Women's Army Auxiliary Corps

The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in France during the First World War.

During the early half of the First World War, women in Scotland had typically worked in the nursing or munitions industries, occasionally running field hospitals and soup canteens or driving ambulances with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry that had been set up in 1907. By 1916, Chalmers Watson had begun to advocate the creation of a corps of women volunteers who could undertake additional ancillary, non-combatant duties; at this time, her brother, Brigadier-General Sir Auckland Geddes, was the director of recruiting at the War Office, and he arranged for his sister to attend a meeting with Sir Nevil Macready, the adjutant-general, to pitch her ideas for the formation of such a corp. On 7 July 1917, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was formally instituted; Macready had requested that Chalmers Watson be its first Chief Controller and senior officer some months earlier, in February 1917. Selecting as her deputy Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Chalmers Watson raised a corps of 40,850 women, of whom some 17,000 served overseas (although never more than 8,777 at a time).

She regarded the creation of the WAAC as "an advance of the women's movement and... a national advance" and noted that for the first time, "women [had] a direct and officially recognised share in the task of our armies both at home and overseas." In a recruiting pamphlet she wrote that "this is the great opportunity for every strong, healthy and active woman not already employed on work of national importance to offer her services to her country." Although Chalmers Watson had to resign from the head of the WAAC in 1918 when one of her sons fell ill after an appendectomy, her efforts had already set a precedent that would be followed – and expanded upon – during the Second World War, laying the foundation for the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which became the Women's Royal Army Corps in 1949. Her work organising the WAAC was recognised by the award of a C.B.E. in 1917, and her portrait was included in the then National War Museum, London (now the Imperial War Museum), at the time of her death.

Politics

WAACs marching in London, 1918

Chalmers Watson was a noted suffragette, and while her own involvement did not include the militant actions of some of her peers, her support was not passive. During the establishment of the WAAC, she had concentrated on improving the levels of pay offered to the women taking over men's jobs. She would also serve as a doctor for the suffragette prisoners in Perth and had been a director of the Time and Tide Publishing Company.

When the Representation of the People Act, 1918 gave the vote to some 8.4 million women, Chalmers Watson became the first president of the Edinburgh Women Citizens' Association, and she was closely involved in the establishment of the Women's United Services Club in Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh: at the time of her death in 1936, she was its president. Chalmers Watson was also one of the founders of the Child Assault Protest Committee (1920). In The Scotsman's obituary notice, published 8 August 1936, the response to her death was said to be a "stunned reaction" characterised by "the inevitable thought – What are all the women's organisations in Edinburgh going to do without her? Societies, hospitals, Queen's Nurses Boards were upheld by her support and inspired by her practical energy."

Later career

In her later career, Chalmers Watson became a member of the Advisory Committee on Nutrition and was an expert member on the Scottish Board of Health's Consultative Councils throughout the 1920s She was also a member of the Standing Committee on Scottish Health Sciences, having been appointed by the Department of Health for Scotland in 1933. The Cathcart Report issued by the Committee on Scottish Health Services has been seen as a model for post-war British medical services and helped lay the foundation for a unique Scottish health system.

In June 1935, she was appointed a member of the Advisory Committee on Diet by the Minister of Health and the Secretary of State for Scotland; the aim of this committee was described as being "to inquire into the facts, quantitative and qualitative, in relation to the diet of the people, and report as to any changes therein which appear desirable in the light of modern advances in the knowledge of nutrition." Her political desire to further the cause of women in medicine saw her take on a number of prominent positions towards the end of her life, and she was president of both the Scottish Women's Medical Association and the British Women's Medical Federation, having been elected to the latter some months before her death.

Fenton Barns

In 1923, Chalmers Watson and her husband inherited the Fenton Barns farm in North Berwick, East Lothian, where they began breeding a herd of tuberculin-tested cattle. Eventually, they established a model dairy which was responsible for the production of certified milk. The farm became renowned across Europe for its pioneering experiments focused specifically on improving the quality of milk and the production and distribution of certified milk for the safer feeding of children; these included issues surrounding the irradiation of milk, its feeding to premature infants, and the production of milk with a more digestible curd.

Death and legacy

Chalmers Watson died at the home of her brother, Sir Auckland Geddes, in Farnsham, Rolvenden, Kent, on 7 August 1936; she was staying with her brother to recuperate from an illness with which she had been coping for some time.

Some months after her death, the relative absence of any commemoration was commented on in a letter to The Scotsman by a T.M. Chapman, who asked,

"There now exists, to her and to our unceasing honour, a worthy and beneficent memorial to Dr. Elsie Inglis, which will always keep her name fragrant to numberless sufferers. Why should not something on at least similar lines be devised to commemorate the admittedly grand labours of Mona Geddes? Why not, even should a hospital or a ward be beyond reach, establish one or more beds in her honour—she was on the Board of Management of the Royal Infirmary—or else a bursary or research scholarship for women medical students? So would her memory be kept green and her indomitable courage be a constant inspiration to many earnest workers who—like me—might have very little chance of ever seeing a bronze plaque in a club hall"

Three years later this oversight was to some extent redressed when Chalmers Watson's co-Chief Controller at the WAAC, Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, formally opened a gateway to the Elsie Inglis Memorial Hospital commemorating Chalmers Watson's life and services to medicine and her country.

A Scotsman article about the opening ceremony noted that immediately after the ribbon was cut, the gateway was "consecrated" by the birth of a baby during an air raid warning; the article quoted Gwynne-Vaughan as saying, "In the old days, a new building was consecrated by the building in of a human being who had therefore died. This was consecrated yesterday by the birth of a baby!"