Mary Annie de Burgh Burt

Mary Annie De Burgh Burt (1874 - 1916) was a sister in the Scottish Women's Hospital (SWH), Girton & Newnham Unit, based in Troyes, France and Macedonia in World War One.^[1][2]

Burt was one of the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute for nurses as a Health Visitor to Finsbury Social Workers’ Association.^[3][4] When she joined the Scottish Women's Hospital as a Sister, Burt was living in London at 49 Norfolk Square, Hyde Park.^[1] She had been a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) who brought together suffrage societies in the UK.^[5] On 28 October 1915, a unit of women sponsored by the NUWSS from London left for Salonika left from Liverpool.^[1]

Burt's unit had travelled with the French Expeditionary Force from France to Serbia and onto Salonika.^[1] The women were exposed not only to the severe challenges for warfront medicine, but to challenges of extremes of weather in winter or summer in a tented hospital, and along with their patients exposed to the risks of malaria and dysentery.^[6]

Mary Burt died on 7 April 1916, at the age of 42,^[3] and was listed on 24 February 1917 among those of the staff at the SWH, who had died of dysentery.^[1] Fellow staff mourned the death of their colleagues but had to continue nursing, of course.^[7] She is buried at Lambet Road Military Cemetery, Salonica, Greece.^[3]

Burt was awarded the French Red Cross Medal,^[8] and was named among over 1500 women who died in the Great War on the roll of honour in York Minster's St Nicholas Chapel Five Sisters Window.^[9][10]