Long life | 14 April 2016

The Royal College of Nursing (founded in 1916 with 34 members, but now with 440,000) is busy celebrating its centenary; and, at its grand headquarters in London’s Cavendish Square, there was another little celebration last week. This was to mark the centenary of a small, short-lived and generally unremembered medical institution, the Anglo-Russian Hospital of St Petersburg, at which some 6,000 wounded Russian soldiers were treated by British doctors and nurses during the last two years of the first world war.

These were only a tiny fraction of the millions of Russians killed and wounded in that dreadful conflict, and the hospital was so completely forgotten that it didn’t even get a mention in the ‘Official Medical History of the Great War’. But at a time when the famously brave and stoic Russian soldiers were dying in far greater numbers in the east than the soldiers of any of its allies in the west, and when there was a great urge in this country to make at least some practical gesture of support for them, this ‘British Empire’s gift to our Russian allies’, as it was called, had great symbolic significance.