Hilda Clark

Hilda Clark (born January 12, 1881 , in Street , Somerset , † February 24, 1955 in Street, Somerset) was a British medic and pacifist.

Life and activity

Youth and education

Clark was the youngest of six children of shoe manufacturer William Stephens Clark and his wife Helen Priestman, b. Bright. The father owned the Clarks' Shoe Factory in Somerset . The family belonged to the Quakers (Society of Friends), whose pacifist and charitable views shaped Clark a lifetime. The atmosphere in the parental home was also liberal and reformist; the parents were among the early advocates of the movement for women's suffragettes , in which the daughter was involved in the years before the First World War.

Clark received home schooling and then attended Southport School and Mount School in York. She then studied medicine in Birmingham. In 1908 she passed the final medical examination at London University .

As one of the first women to be admitted to the medical profession in Great Britain, she specialized in the field of obstetrics and worked in this field at the Birmingham Maternity Hospital. As an advocate of the new injection of tuberculosis as a preventive measure against this disease, she worked as a tuberculosis doctor in Portsmouth . In 1914 she published the book Dispensary Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis about this .

First World War

During the First World War, Clark was active according to her Quaker-pacifist views in the Friends War Victims Relief, which she founded together with Edmund Harvey in 1914, the organization of the Quakers to support and care for the victims of the war. In addition to collecting money and food for the inhabitants of the countries affected by the war, she devoted herself to practical relief work with great intensity: During the war, for example, she built women's hospitals in the war-torn areas of France and Belgium to increase the population in the rear front area supervise. The most important of these was the women's clinic in Châlons-sur-Marne , which she built after the Battle of the Marne. A small clinic at Sermaise les Bains and a daycare center at Bettancourt were later added. In the summer of 1918, she suffered a circulatory collapse as a result of overwork.

Interwar period

After the end of the war, on the recommendation of her friend Jan Smuts , Clark went to Austria, where from July 1919 she organized Quaker relief work for the needy population of the city of Vienna, especially babies and children. The organization she established (Friends' Emergency and War Victims Relief Committee) made significant contributions to the supply of 2 million Viennese with food - especially milk - and to the fight against diseases caused by malnutrition and malnutrition such as rickets , tuberculosis and dystrophy . In practice, Clark managed to do this by collecting foreign currency to purchase cows in Switzerland and the Netherlands that were fed to farmers on farms outside Vienna, while at the same time procuring forage in Croatia and Czechoslovakia. The massive increase in the production of food, especially milk, in the area around the Austrian capital made it possible to supply the Quaker organizations (especially the children's organizations) with food, which they distributed to the Viennese population.

In 1922, Clark traveled to Poland and wrote a report on the dire living conditions there. In the further course of the 1920s, Clark became involved in and for the League of Nations, for which she sat in the International Commission for the Assistance of Children Refugees from 1930 in accordance with her pacifist convictions. During these years she devoted herself to the support of refugees, especially xx chromosome carriers and children, from Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and especially from Greece.

Furthermore, Clark was active in the Women International League and in the Women's Peace Crusade since the 1920s.

In 1936, Clark went to Spain to provide medical assistance to the civilian victims of the Spanish Civil War . In 1938 and 1939 she devoted herself to supporting Jewish refugees from Austria and the German Reich. Also from 1938 (until 1945) she sat on the board of directors of the International Commission for Refugee Children.

World War II and last years

During World War II, Clark served in the Soldiers ', Sailors' and Airmen's Families Association in Kent .

Clark suffered from Parkinson's disease for the last few years of her life . She is buried in the Quaker cemetery on Street in the same grave as Edith Pye .

After the start of the war, Clark was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police forces: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin placed her on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be successful if they were successful Invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following SS special commandos with special priority.

Fonts

• Dispensary Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. 1914.
• War and Its Aftermath: Letters from Hilda Clark ... from France, Austria and the Near East, 1914-1924. 1956.

literature

• Sybil Oldfield: Women Humanitarians. A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Active Between 1900 and 1950. 'Doers of the Word'. 2001, p. 44.
• Anne Powell: Women in the War Zone. Hospital Service in the First World War. P. 389.
• Jennifer S. Uglow , Maggy Hendry: The Northeastern Dictionary of Women's Biography. P. 128.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Hilda Clark on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .