Ever Yours Sincerely

This is the fascinating story of Katherine Stewart MacPhail (1887-1974), the third daughter of Dr Donald MacPhail, a Glasgow physician. Following in her father's footsteps, she studied medicine at Glasgow University, qualifying in 1911. During the First World War she worked as a doctor in France, Serbia, Corsica and on the Salonica front. Following the war's end, she returned to Serbia in order to organise medical care for poor children suffering from tuberculosis, which was a serious medical and social problem at the time, and founded a special hospital for this purpose, first in Belgrade, and then in the village of Sremska Kamenica on the banks of the Danube, near the city of Novi Sad. Under her energetic leadership the hospital flourished, but she was obliged to leave it when Yugoslavia was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. Returning after the war, she was once more forced to leave when the Communist government took over the hospital in 1947, spending the rest of her life in retirement in St Andrews, Scotland. This moving account of her life and work vividly reflects both the heroism and the tragedy of the twentieth century. All proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to a charity set up to restore the "English Hospital" in Sremska Kamenica, as a memorial to Dr. Katherine MacPhail.