The Life and Work of Dr Flora Murray

That the Parliament welcomes that Dumfries Museum is celebrating the life and work of Dr Flora Murray as part of the Women’s History Month celebrations, which took place over the course of March 2023; understands that Dr Flora Murray, from Dalton in Dumfries and Galloway, was a Scottish medical pioneer and a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, also known as the suffragettes, who began her career as a probationer nurse at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, aged 21, and went on to study medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women, the University of Durham and, eventually, the University of Cambridge; notes that, at the time, women doctors were only permitted to treat women and children and could not study general medicine and surgery, which made Dr Murray even more staunch in her women’s rights advocacy, but that, at the outset of the First World War, Dr Murray, along with her partner and fellow medical practitioner, Louisa Garrett Anderson, and in spite of opposition from the British War Office, set up the Women’s Hospital Corps (WHC), which was a group of women doctors and nurses who ran two military hospitals in Paris and Wimereux, France, between September 1914 to January 1915, at which more than 50,000 seriously ill and injured soldiers were treated and countless lives were saved; understands that the exhibition at Dumfries Museum shows how Dr Murray, along with her partner, opened the doors to further fields of opportunity for women physicians and surgeons, and not only for medical women, but for all women who are setting out, or have already set out, to conquer fresh territory, and encourages all who are able to explore the exhibition and to find out more about the inspiring work of Dr Flora Murray.