[Image from GOS/11/18/9 Papers and memorabilia of Great Ormond Street Nurses. Notebooks of Ada Bois. Reproduced with permission of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, Museum and Archive Service.]
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the UKAHN Bulletin, and my third edition as editor. Our articles range widely this year across time and space. Longer articles are inadvertently themed around hospital nursing, at home and abroad. Sue Hawkins and Jan-Thore Lockertsen consider nurse training and hospital settings, with Sue examining the life of a nurse probationer at a London children’s hospital in the early-twentieth century and Jan-Thore considering the way that theatre-nurse training in Norway evolved from the late-twentieth century onwards. Janet Hargreaves and Katherine Roberts both treat high-stakes scenarios, respectively writing about venereal disease at the West London Hospital and comparing COVID-19 in American hospitals with wartime nursing. The longer piece that diverges from this institutional focus is that by Claire Chatterton and Pauline Brand, who analyse nursing responses to the UK’s east-coast floods of 1953.
Short articles this year are all written from a biographical stance, whether of individuals or collectively. David Stewart unpicks the life story of Mary Barker, the first woman recruited as a probationer to the Nightingale nurse-training scheme, while Gavin Wilk sets out the career of Anne Larkin, an Irish woman by birth who trained as a nurse in New York. Partial biographies for members of a group, otherwise termed prosopography, is the key to Vari Drennan’s article about the nurses who were suffragettes, and who were arrested for their commitment to the cause.
We have two reports about exhibitions this year. Rachel Kidd outlines the exciting work of volunteer researchers and a textile artist in bringing to life the stories of workhouse nurses in Norfolk. The other report is based on a poster presentation at our research colloquium in June 2025, when Elizabeth Pearson spoke with feeling about an exhibition in May 2025 celebrating Ugandan nurse pioneers. A project to identify individual nurses who had taken leadership roles, and conferred a meaningful legacy for those who followed, secured international recognition.
We also have four book reviews of works published in 2025. What is particularly pleasing is that the Bulletin is now being sent copies of new books without us having to request them, an illustration of the way that our journal is recognised as a showcase for new historical research and as supplying valuable commentary on fresh perspectives. I am slightly embarrassed, and also very gratified, that the Bulletin this year is hosting a review of my own book!
The big news for the UKAHN this year is that our back-catalogue of Bulletins (initially produced in hard copy) is being added to our website. We owe a huge debt to Carolyn Gibbon for the donation of her paper Bulletins, and to Amanda Gwinnup for digitising the images of each page.
Our research colloquium in 2026 will take place at the University of Kingston in south-west London on 1 June. It will be held in the University’s landmark Town House which opened in early 2020 and won the prestigious 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling prize as Britain’s best new building. The University’s campuses boast riverside locations with easy access to central London (thirty minutes on the train to Waterloo). Look out for the opportunity to book your place in the New Year, which we will advertise via our website and email newsletters.
Alannah Tomkins