Today, I can break twenty months of blog silence. After travelling thousands of miles, visiting numerous libraries and archives, writing countless drafts and receiving a lot of help from kind and generous people, a book about Dr Isabella Stenhouse is imminent.
Publication is set for 25th July, but as a taster, here is the cover, brilliantly designed by Shona Andrew.
Publication is set for 25th July, but as a taster, here is the cover, brilliantly designed by Shona Andrew.
Here is the blurb:
It was the inscription that made the antique scalpels so tantalising: 'Isabella Stenhouse'. A woman doctor? A woman doctor who was rumoured to have served in the First World War? Could Isabella have treated wounded men with these very implements? And had a grateful German prisoner of war really given her the strange string of beads that tangled round her stethoscope?
Coaxing clues from archives across Europe, Katrina Kirkwood traces Isabella's route from medical school to the Western Front, Malta and Egypt, discovering as she travels that Dr Stenhouse was not only one of the first women doctors who worked with the British Army - she was also a woman carrying a tragic secret, torn between ambition and loyalty to her family.
Isabella's story was selected for the BBC Antiques Roadshow's WW1 centenary edition, and featured by national, international and local media.
'The quiet heroics of a woman on a WW1 battlefield' Daily Express.
