Women in Health Care

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, nurses found themselves in the privileged position among British women to take up the call of service to the outreaches of the Empire. They were needed to nurse their own countrymen. In the typically pragmatic way various branches of the Colonial Service developed, the recruitment of nurses was initiated and continued to be carried out by a voluntary body separate from, but in close liaison with, the Colonial Office. This agency was started in 1896 at the instigation of Mrs Francis (later Lady) Piggot, wife of the Procureur General of Mauritius, who had observed that health risks for British officials and settlers in the tropics were considerably heightened by the absence of any trained nurses. Following the philanthropic patterns of the time, she enlisted the help of prominent people to form the Colonial (changed in 1919 to ‘Overseas’) Nursing Association with the specific purpose of recruiting trained nurses in Britain to work in British communities overseas. At its annual meeting in 1899, Sir George Taubman-Goldie¹ praised the work of these nurses, in a paraphrase of Kipling, as ‘the white woman’s burden’ (CNA Annual Report, 1899, p. 81; ONA, p. 131).

It is extraordinarily interesting work but it shows what a wide scope there is for improving the infant mortality of the country. We very rarely get any normal midwifery cases, all abnormal and extraordinary ones at that. We had two deaths of mothers — both having come in almost breathing their last from neglect and unskilled treatment and drugs outside. Really it was too awful to see what some of these poor creatures suffer and a lot of it so unnecessary if they would only come in time.

(Judith Garvey, Nursing Sister in Abeokuta, letter to Secretary of Overseas Nursing Association, 25 January 1926; ON A 140/1/44-5)