Hilda Clark (doctor)

Hilda Clark (12 January 1881 – 24 February 1955) was a British physician and humanitarian aid worker.

Early life

Clark was born 12 January 1881 at Green Bank, Street, Somerset and was the youngest child of the Quaker shoe manufacturer William Stephens Clark and the social reformer Helen Priestman Bright Clark.^[1]

As a child, she was involved in athletics and gymnastics. She had a Quaker education at Brighthelmston, at Birkdale in Southport, Lancashire, about 1896–7, and The Mount, in York, from about 1897 to 1900, before studying medicine at Birmingham University and the Royal Free Hospital, London where she graduated M.B. and B.S. in 1908. She was the sister of Alice Clark, the feminist and historian and the niece of Annie Clark, one the first women to formally train in medicine in Britain. Her mother and great-aunts helped to found a number of women's rights organisations in the 1860s.^[1]

Medicine

Clark specialised in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. She opened and ran two tuberculin dispensaries, the first at her home town of Street in Somerset, the second, by appointment as Medical Officer of the Portsmouth Municipal Tuberculin Dispensary in 1911.^[2]

In 1910 she successfully treated her sister, Alice Clark, a suffragist who was suffering from tuberculosis.^[3] Clark gave a paper on "Tuberculosis Statistics: Some Difficulties in the Presentation of Facts bearing on the Tuberculosis Problem in a Suitable Form for Statistical Purposes", later published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1914.^[4]

World War I

Together with her life-long friend Edith Pye, a nurse and midwife, Clark founded and ran a maternity hospital at Chalons-sur-Marne from 1914 to 1918.^[5]

1923-1937: humanitarian activism

During the 1920s, Clark was an active member of several organisations, including the League of Nations, the Women's Peace Crusade (of which she was secretary), the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees as well as Quaker campaigns such as the Friends' Service Council.^{[citation needed]} She was also an early supporter of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, an organisation concerned with societal acceptance of homosexuality.^[6]

1938 Anschluss

Austria was annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 12 March 1938. Clark travelled to Vienna to use her expertise and connections in generating documentation, placements and qualifications for Jewish people to aid their escape. "Only those most closely concerned can know what the work owed at this stage of rapid expansion to the steady faith and practical experience on Hilda Clark."^[7]

Later life and death

Her home in London was bombed in 1940 and she moved to Kent, where she was active in the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmens Families Association. She became disabled as a result of Parkinson's disease and returned to Street in 1952, where she died at her home on 24 February 1955 and was buried at the Street Quaker burial ground.^[1]

The Hilda Clark room at Friends House, London, UK is named after her.^[8]

Publications

• The Dispensary Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. London, Bailliere & Co. 1915
• Pye, Edith Mary (ed) War and its Aftermath. Letters from Hilda Clark from France, Austria and the Near East 1914-1924. London, Friends Book House, 1956
• The Armaments Industry: a study of the report of the Royal Commission on the Manufacture of and Trade in Arms and Munitions of War and of the Evidence published in the Minutes of the Commission during 1936. London, Women’s Peace Crusade 1937

Archives

Hilda Clark Papers. 1908-1950.Temp MSS 301. The Library of the Society of Friends, London.

References

1. Holton, Sandra Stanley (2004). "Clark, Hilda (1881–1955), physician and humanitarian aid worker". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38518. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
2. National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution (1911: London); London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1911). Report of the proceedings of the public health section [of the National Conference...], held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, on May 30th and 31st, and June 1st and 2nd, 1911 [electronic resource]. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. London : P.S. King & Son. pp. 89.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
3. Holton, Sandra Stanley (1996). Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. London: Routledge. p. 171. ISBN 9780415109413. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
4. Clark, Hilda (1914). "Tuberculosis Statistics: Some Difficulties in the Presentation of Facts bearing on the Tuberculosis Problem in a Suitable Form for Statistical Purposes". Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 7 (Section of Epidemiology and State Medicine): 55–80. doi:10.1177/003591571400701503. PMC 2002956. PMID 19978160.
5. Palfreeman, Linda (2021). "The Maternité Anglaise: A Lasting Legacy of the Friends' War Victims' Relief Committee to the People of France during the First World War (1914–1918)". Religions. 12 (4): 265. doi:10.3390/rel12040265. hdl:10637/12885.
6. Holton, Sandra Stanley (2002). Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge. ISBN 9781134837878.
7. Darton (1954) Friends Committee for Refugees & Aliens 1933-1950 London p52
8. "Meeting Rooms". Friends House. Retrieved 3 January 2023.

• Bailey, Brenda A Quaker Couple in Germany York: Sessions 1994
• Holmes, Rose (2015) 1933-39 A moral business: British Quaker work with refugees from fascism. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University of Sussex.