New Zealand Nursing, 1901-1931: Exceptional Service In ...

New Zealand nursing, 1901-1931: Exceptional service in extraordinary circumstances

In the three decades following its formal recognition as a profession in 1901, New Zealand nursing faced challenges with innovation and resilience, creating new health services, caring for soldiers at war, facing a pandemic and rallying in a major earthquake.
This event can be attended both online or in person.

New Zealand nursing gained formal recognition as a profession in 1901. In the next three decades, the profession proved its worth as a vital part of the country’s emerging health system. Besides radically improving the care people received in hospitals, nurses developed innovative responses to New Zealand’s changing health needs.

Dr Pamela Wood will talk about nurses’ exceptional service in extraordinary circumstances. From the 1890s, district nurses had already adapted their hospital skills to care for the sick poor in their own homes. In the early 1900s, similarly clever innovation was needed in caring for typhoid patients in remote fever camps, and in developing government services to care for settlers opening up farmland in the backblocks and to support Māori improving health in rural settlements. In World War I, more than 550 New Zealand nurses served overseas, facing its horrors with resilience. As the war ended, those at home struggled with the overwhelming influenza pandemic of 1918. And in 1931, at the end of these first three decades, nurses showed their extraordinary ability to cope effectively in a major earthquake.

The Friends of the Turnbull Library, Nga Hoa o te Whare Pukapuka Turnbull, offer a monthly programme of public talks that are free to all. The public programme highlights the work of researchers who draw on Turnbull material for their projects.

Speaker: Dr Pamela Wood is a retired academic, registered nurse and independent historian specialising in the history of health. She has published extensively, including Dirt: Filth and decay in a New World Arcadia (2005) and most recently New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our people, 1880-1950 (2022).

Enquiries & RSVP: turnbullfriends@gmail.com

Images: Napier hospital patients in the botanical gardens after the Hawkes Bay earthquake, 1931. Photographer unidentified. Reference: 1/2-060975-F