Laura Forster

Laura Elizabeth Forster (1858–1917) was an Australian medical doctor, surgeon and nurse noted for her service in France, Belgium, Turkey and Russia during World War I.

Forster was born in the Sydney suburb of Ryde in 1858 to William Forster (1818-1882), a landowner, poet, politician and Premier of New South Wales during 1859–1860, and his wife Eliza Jane Wall (1828-1862). Laura was the fifth of six children to William and Eliza Forster. Eliza Wall Forster died in 1862 and William married Maud Julia Edwards (1846-1893). With Maud, William had five children, including three sons who were killed in World War I while with the Australian Imperial Force. Shortly after William Forster's death in 1882, Laura accompanied her stepmother and half sister, Enid, to England. Maud eventually married John Burn Murdoch, of Edinburgh, and a captain in the Royal Engineers. Laura remained in England. On Nov. 1, 1887, she entered Bern University in Switzerland, as a medical student. She graduated in 1894 and was certified to practice medicine in the United Kingdom the following year. At Bern University she studied 12 semesters at the Pathological Institute researching muscle spindle fibers.

Forster attended Sydney schools through about 1879. After completing dual training as both a doctor and a nurse, Forster settled in England and practiced medicine in Oxford. She was also licensed by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow; Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh; and Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. In 1900 she was appointed medical officer of the Cutler Boulter Dispensary in Oxford. While at Cutler Boulter she was interested in determining the causes and effects of ovarian diseases in mentally ill women. At the Claybury Asylum pathology laboratory in London, she performed autopsies on about 100 deceased women received from London and Charing Cross hospitals. Dr. Frederick Mott published Forster’s findings posthumously in 1917. In 1907, she published a research paper on the histology of tubercular human lymphatic glands under the supervision of Dr. Gustav Mann. In 1912, at the outbreak of the First Balkan War, she travelled to Epirus to work as a nurse because women were not permitted to work as physicians at the front.

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