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Grace Neill: “nondescript combatant against drink, poverty, factory owners and the medical profession”

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Born into the Scottish gentry in 1846, the young Grace Campbell did not defy her father when forbidden to study medicine and instead trained as a nurse in London, but was later shunned by her family for marrying a doctor considered below her. After training as a midwife, she and her husband and their only child emigrated to Queensland for her husband’s health. After she was widowed, the single parent helped found a trade union for women that led to a state appointment on a Royal Commission on Labour Conditions and an invitation soon after to cross the Tasman.
And so, began her career in the New Zealand public service – most of it in her deputy inspector role, with a brief to deal with the ‘numerous and delicate’ questions affecting women in the areas of health and welfare. Much of her job involved working with stressed and stretched local hospital and charitable aid boards. But a major focus also became nursing reform and she is most famous as the instigator of what is said to be the world’s first national registration act for nurses, which was passed in 1901. Her own name was first on the register and she also set in place the nursing curriculum, set up the state final exam and designed the registered nurse medal.
In 1904 she followed this up with the Midwives Act 1904, but this involved also establishing a series of state maternity hospitals – known as the St Helen’s Hospitals, after the birthplace of Premier Richard Seddon – where registered midwives could be trained. The hospitals were to be “for mothers, managed by women and doctored by women” with no male medical students allowed. The self-described “nondescript combatant against drink, poverty, factory owners and the medical profession” later said her two most successful achievements were raising her son and “making the pains and risks of child bearing less” for hundreds of women who birthed in St Helen’s Hospitals.
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