[3] James Ness MacBean Ross, her brother, became a naval doctor and was awarded the Military Cross and bar and the Croix de Guerre during the First World War.

[3] She wrote a memoir describing her experience among them, A Lady Doctor in Bakhtiari Land, which was published posthumously with her brother James as editor.

She subsequently became ship's surgeon on the Glasgow Line SS Glenlogan,[6] a post which took her to India and Japan before she returned to Isfahan in 1914.

The first phase of the Austro-Hungarian campaign against Serbia had resulted in the Serbian army suffering heavy casualties and a typhus epidemic among the military and the civilian populations.

[8] Elizabeth Ross arrived in January 1915 and volunteered to work in Kragujevac, the city worst affected by the epidemic, accounting for almost 10 percent of all cases in Serbia.

[2] The conditions under which Ross worked were described by Louise Fraser, a nurse who visited her from the nearby Scottish Women's Hospital, who wrote that she had seen "some of the worst slum dwellings in Britain, but never anything to approach these wards in filth and squalor.

[6] She is buried in the cemetery in Kragujevac, the inscription on her gravestone including, in Serbian, the text: "In memory of Dr. E. Ross and two nurses who died in 1915 in our town while attending to our ill and wounded soldiers.

which includes the words "This tablet has been erected and hospital beds endowed in Serbia by public subscription in remembrance of the noble life and sacrifice of one whose home was for many years in Tain.