Nurse and nurse activist.

28 June 1841 – 14 June 1930

A tribute to Catherine Jane Wood by Dr Sue Hawkins

Catherine Jane Wood was definitely a Bloomsbury woman who spent most of her life living in or around the district. Not much is known about her personal life – no diaries or memoires have come to light. But her professional life, as a nurse and nurse activist, is well documented through her own writings and that of colleagues.

She was born 28 June 1841 in Doughty Street (on the eastern fringes of Bloomsbury), the second child of a wealthy Yorkshire-born mill and property proprietor. Her home was close to Great Ormond Street’s Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) which opened in 1852. Even as an adolescent, in the late 1850s, Catherine was a ward visitor.  She did what she felt to be her Christian duty, helping and entertaining  sick children by reading to them.  This led to her interest in the nursing of sick children and, in 1863, she took the unusual step of becoming a Ward Superintendent, attaching herself to Charles West (the Hospital’s founding doctor) in order to absorb his knowledge and skills.

In 1867 Catherine left the HSC to establish a new hospital in Queen Square which became known as the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease. However, she was lured back to the HSC in 1869 to take charge of nursing at the hospital’s new convalescent home at Highgate.  After several disagreements with the Management Committee (Wood became known for her forthright manner), she threatened to resign. The managers, fearful of losing her skills, responded by offering her the job of Lady Superintendent at the main hospital. In 1879 Wood became the hospital’s first trained head of nursing.

Wood implemented many of West’s visions for training children’s nurses, setting the foundations for a new sort of children’s nursing.  However, she resigned again in January 1888, and some of her peers were glad at her departure.  Adrian Hope, the hospital secretary, wrote to his fiancée: ‘To the intense & open joy of the doctors … [they] have forced the Committee to ask her to go so it is a good job over.’ (Letters of Engagement p. 410.) In her resignation letter Catherine had a different explanation. She explained that her brother had died leaving a large family behind and Wood felt it was her familial duty to support his bereaved widow.

After her departure Wood wrote A Handbook for the Nursing of Sick Children, published in 1889. This went to several editions and was later described in the British Medical Journal as a ‘standard work’ in its day. (British Journal of Nursing, July 1930, p. 191).

Catherine dedicated the rest of her life to the advancement of nursing education and welfare. In 1886, she was a member of Henry Burdett’s Hospitals Association nursing subcommittee. The aim was to promote the professionalisation of nursing through standardised training and a nurse register. Henry Burdett was an activist in the world of voluntary hospitals and Wood’s relationship with him (as with many male managers she encountered) was prickly.  In a dismissive note he wrote to her: ‘I thought that your refusal to accept my ruling as Chairman was not of so urgent a character as to warrant me in calling a special meeting to consider it.’  It is said that things between them blew up at a secret meeting of the nursing subcommittee to which Wood and her supporters had not been invited; the excluded matrons led by Wood, stormed the committee room.  Wood reportedly ‘planted her square-cut person in the doorway, exclaiming “We are here by right and not by courtesy”, swept the enemy aside and took the chair’. (British Journal of Nursing, September 1943, p99-100).

Wood, Ethel Fenwick (another influential nurse-leader) and other like-minded matrons formed a breakaway organisation, the British Nurses Association (later the Royal British Nurses’ Association, RBNA). Its goals were to establish a register of qualified nurses, and a nation-wide, minimum three-year, nurse training course. Wood became Honorary Secretary of the new Association and travelled the country promoting its aims and encouraging membership. It was only marginally successful – full registration of nurses did not happen until 1919 – and Wood resigned in 1892, frustrated by internal disputes which, in her opinion, held back progress. While this was happening she also established the Nurses’ Hostel in Percy Street (on the western fringes of Bloomsbury), its purpose to provide comfortable and safe accommodation for private nurses in central London. It later became a nursing agency, revolutionising the private nursing market by providing private nurses.

In1892, Catherine was appointed Special Commissioner by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to undertake an inquiry into the state of workhouses in England and Ireland. Her findings were published by the BMJ in a series of over 50 articles in 1894 and 1895. She regarded the inquiry as the best work she had undertaken, and it was instrumental in convincing the Local Government Board, in 1897, to prohibit the use of pauper nurses in workhouse infirmaries. (British Journal of Nursing, July 1930, p. 191)

But Wood was no feminist. There is no evidence that she supported the suffrage movement (as Ethel Fenwick did), rather she seemed to support the argument that men and women had their own roles to fulfil in the greater scheme. As she wrote in 1901 ‘though we [nurses] do not claim independence of the medical profession, we claim freedom to discuss our own affairs, to make our own laws, to decide on common principles of work.’ (Nursing Record, 28 December 1901, p. 518).

Catherine Wood was a devoutly religious woman. She believed strong faith would protect young nurses from the dangers to which nursing would subject them.  She was an early member of the Guild of St Barnabas, established to provide spiritual haven and support to nurses, and was secretary-general from the early 1880s to 1921. Under this guise (at the age of 65) she undertook an ambitious round-the-world tour of the Guild’s outposts in Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Honolulu and Canada (among others). She was away for eight months, recording her exploits in a series of articles for Misericordia.  

Despite her disagreements with key individuals in the nursing world, Wood was held in great esteem during her lifetime. In 1889, Nursing Notes remarked ‘In any other country in Europe except our own, such work as Miss Wood has done would, long ago, have received more public recognition and more substantial reward.’ (Nursing Notes, 29 November 1888, p497.) She was also one of only a handful of women to have entries in several early 20^th century editions of Who’s Who.

Catherine Wood died on 14 June 1930 at home in Hartfield, Sussex, six months before her 90^th birthday. Obituaries praised her contribution to nursing.  The British Journal of Nursing described her as ‘a well-known and forceful personality in the nursing world’. (British Journal of Nursing, July 1930, p.191.) The Reverend H. Ross, Chaplain-general of the Guild of St Barnabas summed up her character succinctly: ‘‘Deliberate, downright, outspoken, transparently genuine … She had a real sense of humour and a gentle side too …centering her all in God and His church.’ (Misericordia July 1930, p73).

Dr Sue Hawkins is an independent historian and writer.

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Some Key achievements and Interests

Establishment of the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease, Queen Square with Mrs Howard Marsh, nee Spencer-Percival.

First trained Lady Superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street.

Founding member of the Royal British Nurses Association.

Longest-serving secretary to the Guild of St Barnabas.

Report on the State of Workhouse Nursing for the British Medical Journal.

Establishment of the Nurses’ Hostel.

Executive Committee of Louisa Twining’s Workhouse Infirmary Nursing Association (WHINA).

Member of the Committee of the Invalid Children’s Aid Society.

Promoted the cause of female Poor Law inspectors as member of the Women’s Local Government Society.

Female Networks:

Ethel Fenwick, Florence Nightingale, Louisa Twining.

Publications include:

A Handbook of Nursing for the Home and the Hospital (London: Cassell & Co, 1878).

Food and Cookery for Infants and Invalids … With an introductory chapter by W. B. Cheadle (London: International Health Exhibition,1884)

A Handbook for the Nursing of Sick Children, with a few hints on their management (London: Cassell & Co, 1889).

Boards of Guardians and Nurses (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1893).

Cottage Lectures on Home Nursing (London: Christian Knowledge Society, 1893).

Special Commissioner’s Report on the State of Workhouses in British Medical Journal, 1894-95.

Articles in Nursing Record/British Journal of Nursing, Nursing Notes and Misericordia and letters to medical journals such as British Medical Journal and The Lancet

Sources

British Journal of Nursing (1902-1943).

Sue Hawkins, ‘Wood, Catherine Jane (1841–1930)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  

Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster (ed), Letters of Engagement 1884-1888: the love letters of Adrian Hope and Laura Troubridge (London: The Street Press, 2002).

Misericordia, the journal of the Guild of St Barnabas (1883-1930).

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust Archive Service.

Guild of St Barnabas Archive, Lambeth Palace Library.

Nursing Notes (1888-1899).

Nursing Record (1888-1902).

Henry Burdett Papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

Royal British Nurses’ Association Archive, King’s College, London.

Who’s Who 1914 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1914).