Lieutenant Francis Evelyn Windsor

Lieutenant (Army).

Dr. Windsor is sometimes cited as the first female physician to receive an appointment with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. She was in fact the second. Nursing Sister Margaret Parks MD was the first, and the only one to practice medicine with the CAMC during the Great War. Dr. Windsor remained with the CAMC only a few weeks, just long enough to obtain army transport to the UK, where she immediately resigned her commission to join the RAMC auxiliary. (Windsor is mentioned as the first woman physician commissioned into the CAMC in Hacker and Vining's A Companion to Women's Military History, p. 195, accessible via Google Books). This assertion is based on Carlotta Hacker's 1974 publication, The Indomitable Lady Doctors, a widely cited reference, as well as Windsor's 1966 obituary, probably Hacker's source, which rightly heaped praise but wrongly stated "in 1915 she joined the army as its first woman doctor.". CEF service files provide correct details.)

Following the war, Dr. Windsor returned to Calgary to practice on the Blackfoot Indian reserve for the next 20 yrs. While working alongside the RAMC in England, she married E.P. Leacock, brother of humourist Stephan Leacock. She retired from practice in 1948 and died at Calgary Oct. 18, 1966.