Remarkable Elsie Inglis deserves a statue we can all relate to - Susan Morrison

Medical pioneer and women's suffrage campaigner Elsie Inglis was born in India in 1864, but returned to the family home in Edinburgh at 14

​Mr Gormley cast each of the six images from his own body, and I for one am not impressed by being confronted by the sight of Tony’s todger.

Statues are pretty dull, in the main. Well, most of them are top of plinths, generally ignored unless they have a foot (David Hume) or a nose (Greyfriars Bobby) to rub. Or they look good in the Instagram accounts of the travel influencer crowd who like to snap themselves next to a Nazi-fighting bear.

Of course, some get their statues argued about and even pulled down. It must be a great comfort to Viscount Dundas, wherever he is, that his towering column saves him from a worse fate than a cheeky wee lucky nose rub.

There are, as has been pointed out many times, more statues of animals than there are of women in this city and definitely more of men, be they clothed, unclothed, great and scandalous. Still, the pigeons need somewhere to sit, I guess.

It’s not for the lack of women who deserve some sort of recognition. If we really started to raise monuments to our great women we’d probably make the pavements unwalkable.

Dr Elsie Inglis was a woman of incredible achievement and she has been waiting for her moment for a long time.

She did once have a maternity hospital named after her. I bet she would have approved of that. Elsie was nothing if not a practical woman. Sadly they closed it in 1988. Promises were made that her name and memory would be carried onto a new maternity wing in any new hospital built in the city

That’s what they did when they closed the Simpson Maternity Pavilion. The name of Queen Victoria's favourite male gynaecologist lived on in the shiny new Royal Infirmary out at Little France. He’s also got a statue, which I think he deserved. He seemed like a decent bloke and any man that is keen on pain relief in childbirth gets my vote.

But there you go. Jimmy got a statue and a glow-up at the new hospital. Elsie was quietly sidelined.

The campaign to properly honour Elsie Inglis has been long, arduous and frankly a bit weird. The money was raised. A competition was announced. Then suddenly, the whole thing was given over to a bloke, Andrew Stoddart.

No doubt he's good at this sort of thing. You don’t get to be the King's Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland by banging out Plasticine models of dinosaurs. But Mr Stoddart’s big idea turned out to be basically a giant version of a photograph of Elsie in battle dress. Almost predictably, he’s stuck her up a plinth. Remote, alone and pretty much unseeable for short people (me).

In Glasgow they unveiled a statue to the formidable rent strike leader and social campaigner, Mary Barbour. It's street level, almost eyeball-to-eyeball. The locals love it, and if anyone at Govan station asks about it, people can tell them who she was and what she did.

Let's give Elsie a memorial we can truly relate to.