Winifred Buckley

Winifred Buckley
"An Operation at the Military Hospital, Endell Street - Dr L Garrett, Dr Flora Murray, Dr W Buckley"(1920) by Francis Dodd
Born	(1883-10-18)18 October 1883 Calcutta, India
Died	10 April 1959(1959-04-10) (aged 75)
Nationality	British
Known for	assistant surgeon at the Endell Street Military Hospital
Scientific career
Fields	surgery, military medicine

Winifred Finnimore Buckley (18 October 1883 - 10 April 1959) was one of the woman-surgeons working at the famous Endell Street Military Hospital in London during the First World War. ^[1]

Life

She was born in Calcutta, India, to Ada Marion Sarah Finnimore and Robert Burton Buckley (1847-1927), a civil engineer then working in Bengal. ^[2]

After graduating at the London School of Medicine for Women, Buckley worked for a year in a junior post at Harrow Road children's hospital and for six months as a house surgeon in Kingston upon Hull. ^[3] When she joined the Endell Street hospital in 1914, she was one of the youngest doctors there. She came to regard that time as "perhaps the happiest time in her life". ^[4]

In January 1920, the King appointed her as Officer of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her “valuable services” rendered in Military Hospitals during the War. ^[5]

On the same year, she was registered as a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, London (LRCP) and as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS). ^[6]

Buckley is portrayed, along with the two leading figures of the Endell Street hospital Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, in the oil-on-canvas painting by Francis Dodd “An Operation at the Military Hospital, Endell Street”(1920), now preserved in the collections of the Imperial War Museum. ^[7]

Bibliography

• Wendy Moore, Endell Street. The trailblazing women who ran World War One's most remrkable military hospital, Atlantic Books, London 2020, pp. 376

References

1. “World War One: Endell Street hospital's suffragette surgeons”, BBC News online, 28 February 2014.
2. William P. W. Phillimore, Memorials of the family of Fynmore etc., Published by the Author, London 1886, p. 54
3. Moore 2020, p. 102.
4. Moore 2020, p. 102.
5. The Edinburgh Gazette, 3 February 1920, p. 321.
6. Supplement to The London Gazette, 30 January 1920, p. 1238.
7. "An Operation at the Military Hospital, Endell Street : Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, Dr Flora Murray, Dr Winifred Buckley".