Biography. Laura Elizabeth Forster [1858 (Sidney, Australia) – 1917 (Zalishchyky, Russia –currently, Ukraine-)], was the daughter of Elizabeth Jane Wall and William Forster. Her father was a poet and politician. When she was four, her mother died and she was left in the care of her sister, Mary Elizabeth, who was 12 years older. In 1873, her father William married Maud Julia Edwards. With William, Maud gave Laura a half-sister, Enid, and three half-brothers. The boys – John, Herbert and Lionel – would have distinguished military careers and all would die in the World War I. Forster graduated as M.D. at the University of Bern, Switzerland (1887-1894) while conducting research activities at the Institute of Pathology for 6 years. In 1895 Laura Forster (M.D.) received the certificate allowing her to work as a GP in the United Kingdom, practicing medicine first in Glasgow, then in Edinburgh and finally in Oxford as medical officer at the Cutler Boulter Dispensary. There she studied the relation between mental and ovarian disorders and got in contact to the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Oxford, publishing her first and second papers (Forster, 1902; Forster, 1907). In order to gain greater command of neurohistological techniques, Laura Forster requested to stay “a few months” (1911) at the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas (Madrid, Spain), the laboratory of the 1906 Nobel awardee in Physiology or Medicine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal [1852 (Petilla de Aragón, Spain) -1934 (Madrid, Spain)]. In 1912, with the outburst of the First Balkan War, Dr Forster voluntarily enrolled the British Army as a nurse (since women weren´t allowed to join the Army as physicians), and was destined to the Epirus front. At the beginning of the First World War, in 1914, she joined the British Red Cross, enlist in the Allied Medical Corps and worked at the British Field Hospital in Antwerp (Belgium), becoming the first female Australian doctor to assist in the wartime medical effort. Then Forster was moved to Northern France and to Russia (1915), alternating in different fronts of the war. She volunteered as a surgeon at the largest hospital in Petrograd (Russia –current Saint Petersburg-), working “very happily with the Russian doctors, without need of an interpreter”. Later on, Dr Forster joined the Russian Red Cross and served in the Caucasus and Erzurum (Turkey), supervising a 150-beds field hospital for infectious diseases in the middle of a typhus epidemic during the summer of 1916. Finally, she was sent into a hospital operated by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (United Kingdom) in Zalishchyky, in the Galicia region (Russia).