By the end of World War I, 14 medical units had been outfitted and sent to serve in Corsica, France, Malta, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia.

[9] The initial staff included Inglis, Alice Hutchison, Ishobel Ross,[10] Cicely Hamilton,[4] Marian Gamwell,[11] and Katherine Harley.

The Scottish Women's Hospitals serviced 14 medical units across mainland France and Corsica, Malta, Romania, Russia, Salonika and Serbia.

[2] The abbey was the property of Édouard Goüin [fr], a rich industrialist and philanthropist whose poor health rendered him unable to fight.

A further hospital was opened at Troyes (Château de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine) and Villers-Cotterets along with the popular and supportive canteens at Creil, Soissons and Crepy-en-Valois.

The Serbian army had a mere 300 doctors to serve more than half a million men, and as well as battle casualties the hospital had to deal with a typhus epidemic which ravaged the military and civilian populations.

[12] Four SWH staff, Louisa Jordan, Madge Fraser, Augusta Minshull and Bessie Sutherland died during the epidemic, the first two are buried in Niš Commonwealth Military Cemetery.

Despite treatment by a Serbian major and another passenger from the car, (nurse Margaret Cowie Crowe) in a Red Cross camp to which she was taken, she died.

As a direct consequence of this the SWH set up a convalescent hospital in Corsica in December 1915 to help displaced Serb women and children.

The hospital (known as the Girton & Newnham Unit after the Cambridge University women's colleges which funded it) was set up in a disused silkworm factory in the border town of Gevgelia, though it soon had to be relocated to the city of Salonika when the rapid Bulgarian advance threatened.

Much of the work at Salonika was spent fighting malaria, a huge killer made worse by the lack of suitable clothing supplied by the Allied armies.

It served in southern Russia (Bessarabia and Moldova) and in Romania, providing medical care chiefly to the Serbian Division of the Russian army.

Together they provided much needed help during the campaigns of 1918 which saw the Serbs and their British, French, Russian, Greek and Italian allies drive the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Bulgarians out of Macedonia and Serbia.

A new fixed hospital was established in Vranje for 300 patients, but by early 1919 this had been handed over to the Serbian authorities - more or less bringing to an end the SWH.

Dr Katherine Stewart MacPhail opened a hospital for sick children in Belgrade (and continued this work until forced out by Tito's government in 1947); Evelina Haverfield ran a hospital for orphans until her tragic death in March 1920; and some others did what they could to help, often using their own money, to single-handedly help destitute soldiers, refugees or the many orphans and widows who were all in desperate need of assistance.

Over £500,000 was raised by every manner possible to fund the organisation and during the war years it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of patients' lives were save; all nursed and helped by the SWH.

Additional SWH members' materials are held in various archive offices: memoirs of Katherine North née Hodges are in the Leeds Russian Archive; the journals of Mary Lee Milne are held by the National Library of Scotland, papers of Lilas Grant and Ethel Moir are in the Central Library, Edinburgh; the Lothian Health Archives hold the letters of Yvonne Fitzroy and more than sixty other documents relating to the hospital; a Photograph album relating to the Scottish Women's Hospital in Salonika, 1907–1918 (ref RCPSG 74) is held at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, whilst the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University holds the papers of Ruth Holden.