Eliza Maud "Elsie" Inglis (16 August 1864 – 26 November 1917) was a Scottish doctor, surgeon, teacher, suffragist, and founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals. She was the first woman to hold the Serbian Order of the White Eagle. Early life and education Inglis was born on 16 August 1864, in the hill station town of Naini Tal, India. Inglis had eight siblings and was the second daughter and third youngest. Her parents were Harriet Lowes Thompson and John Forbes David Inglis (1820–1894), a magistrate who worked in the Indian civil service as Chief Commissioner of Oudh through the East India Company, as did her maternal grandfather. Inglis's parents considered the education of a daughter as important as that of a son, and also had them schooled in India. Elsie and her sister Eva had 40 dolls which she used to treat for 'spots' (measles) she had painted on. Inglis's father was religious and used his position in India to “encourage native economic development, spoke out against infanticide and promoted female education." Inglis's maternal grandfather was Rev Henry Simson of Chapel of Garioch in Aberdeenshire. She was a cousin to the gynaecologist Sir Henry Simson, as well as fellow female medical pioneer Grace Cadell. Inglis's father retired (when aged 56) from the East India Company to return to Edinburgh, via Tasmania, where some of her older siblings settled. Inglis went on to a private education in Edinburgh (where she had led a successful demand by the schoolgirls to use private gardens in Charlotte Square) and finishing school in Paris. Inglis's decision to study medicine was delayed by nursing her mother, during her last illness (scarlet fever) and her death in 1885, when she felt obliged to stay in Edinburgh with her father. In 1887, the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women was opened by Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and Inglis started her studies there. In reaction to Jex-Blake's methods, and after two fellow students Grace and Georgina Cadell were expelled, Inglis and her father founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women, under the auspices of the Scottish Association for the Medical Education of Women, whose sponsors included Sir William Muir, a friend of her father from India, now Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Inglis's sponsors also arranged clinical training for female students under Sir William MacEwen at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. In 1892, she obtained the Triple Qualification, becoming