ABSTRACT
Lured by the call of duty or the promise of adventure, and apparently undeterred by the region's reputation for dangerous Arabs, dirt, dust, heat and disease, Allied women from Britain and the Dominions provided medical care in the Middle East under some of the most challenging circumstances of the First World War. Despite this reluctance to have much needed, medically trained women near the battlefields, many women eventually made their way to the Middle East, with nurses reaching Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in 1916. Drawing on published and unpublished life writing and interviews held in British archives, this chapter examines the war service of Allied nurses in the Middle East. Apart from the hardships of climate and sub-standard accommodation, women serving in the Middle East were also subject to the many diseases to which their patients succumbed. These women's accounts allow us to see aspects of cultural, physical and human landscapes of the war that have remained obscured.
