[6] She had two brothers, John S. Twigge (born 1872)[5] who was to become a curate at Waverton-cum-Dundraw, Cumbria[7] before in 1896, being ordained in Carlisle Cathedral to serve in the parish of Ravenstondale, Westmorland.

[citation needed] Matthews served voluntarily in the 1908 Messina earthquake, when the city lost almost half its population including nurses and doctors.

[2] [16] She had been expected to take up a medical role with a leper community in China but did not get there,[1] returning from Tibet on a ship specially chartered to lend assistance to Italy.

[17] Matthews was said to have been simply treated as one of the soldiers when attached to the Grenadiers and had seen 'horrors unspeakable' or 'gruesome sights' including an 'inferno worse than that depicted by Dante' whilst working to save lives in this destructive disaster.

In 1910, Dr. Matthews was the only woman, and the only English speaker, among the soldiers assisting civilians in the village of Cinquefronde, Calabria, where a smallpox[18] infection was also rife and the town was placed 'under the yellow flag'.

[2][21] Her war diary articles, for example, in The Sphere January 1913, explain more about her experiences; for example, in an incident when Matthews was going to the aid of an injured officer at night in a blizzard, she fell on the rough road.

[23] In November 1912, in The Gentlewoman, an item titled 'A Lady Doctor at the Front', tells that she was in Syria before volunteering for military hospital work, and thus was inappropriately clothed for the Balkan weather.

She recounts there were 4,000 wounded treated per week, with only amateur nurses and even children as 'ward orderlies', but surprisingly only 16 deaths, despite her own language problems and lack of support from Russian doctors.

'[26][27] Her articles for The Sphere formed an illustrated war diary e.g. in July 1915, describing the Scottish Women's unit travelling to Malta to assist the evacuated wounded, and then to Greece, and on to Nish (Niš) in Serbia.

[3] She was eventually released to the Scottish Women's Ambulance Unit, in Hungary, and allowed to leave with them, but had further challenges running into German 'spies' whilst travelling through Switzerland,[25] one of whom she was said to have pushed off the train at Lucerne.

[33] Matthews also wrote a series of articles on the same themes for The Courier, titled In the Hands of the Hun – The Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia.

[35] She gave details, such as working amicably with the Hungarian chief medical officer during a deadly diphtheria outbreak, who was to be replaced by a 'coward' CMO, who would not enter the cholera ward, but left Matthews in charge.

[36] In her own words, quoted in The Yorkshire Post, despite experiencing evil spirits in men's eyes, cunning and blood-lust, Matthews had 'never met before such peculiarly fiendish expressions of absolute hatred as were directed towards me by those Teutonic officers'.

[37] Her work was compared with autobiographical writing from another woman who became a volunteer fighter in the Serbian army, Flora Sandes,[29] whose memoirs were aimed at raising money for the Serbs.

As Matthews had had an interest in Spiritualism, and a medium had predicted her (own) sudden death, which she had believed would occur due to her residual ill health (including suffering 'heart attacks') 'as a result of her privations while serving as a doctor during the Serbian retreat', she had transferred £500 of war bonds to Miss Johns.

[citation needed] Matthews' health was indeed harmed from her war experiences, and she died of pneumonia after influenza[30] at the age of 49, at home in Longton Grove, Sydenham[2] and buried in Amy Johns' grave in the small cemetery at Downe, near Farnborough.