Elisabeth Jardin was born into a military family. Her father, Colonel Armand Marie Jardin, was an infantry officer and professor at the École Supérieure de Guerre; her grandfather, Édélestan Jardin, had served as a naturalist and inspector in the Marine. Her mother, Henriette Maillin, came from Quimper in Finistère.
A medical student at the outbreak of war, Jardin sailed for the Dardanelles in July 1915 aboard the hospital ship Duguay Trouin with the first echelon of French nurses. She was among the earliest female nurses to reach Lemnos, arriving weeks before the first Australian sisters landed on 5 August. At Mudros she staffed Evacuation Hospital no. 1, the sprawling facility on the hillside south of the town that grew to become the largest hospital on the island.
On 12 April 1917, by then serving at Zeitenlik on the outskirts of Salonika, she was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Croix de Guerre. Her sister Marguerite also served, with the field ambulance at Veria in Macedonia.
After the war Jardin completed her medical degree and in 1919 married Eugène Fabre. Her doctoral thesis, submitted in 1920 to the Faculty of Medicine of Paris under her married name, documented the organisation, case-loads and pathologies of the hospital at Mudros. She died in May 1929, recorded as Madame le Docteur Elisabeth Jardin.
A photographic album compiled by Jardin during her service surfaced decades later, rescued from a rubbish bin in Paris. Her photographs illustrate the English translation of her thesis, published alongside the memoir of Jeanne Antelme in Mudros, 1915.
