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Book Review
| Judith Godden, Lucy Osburn, a Lady Displaced: Florence Nightingale's Envoy to Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. x + 373. $34.95 paper.
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| If you are interested in how formal nursing developed in Australia, then this is the book for you. In an engaging and highly readable style, University of Sydney historian, Judith Godden has reconstructed the life of New South Wales' first professional nurse, Lucy Osburn. Appointed to the position by Florence Nightingale on a request by the NSW government led by Henry Parkes, Lucy Osburn, along with five nurses, arrived in Sydney in 1868 to take up the position as Lady Superintendent of the Sydney Infirmary (later the Sydney Hospital) in Macquarie Street. Osburn's brief was to reform nursing and establish a training school based on Nightingale's methods. |
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From the outset, this was going to be a tough appointment. With little experience of real nursing, but with the correct personal attributes as befitted a 'Lady' of mid-Victorian times, 31-year-old Yorkshire born Lucy Osburn was thrown in the deep end. Godden's impeccably researched biography narrates in great detail the problems Osburn encountered at the Sydney Hospital. She came up against a litany of Australian colonial views, misogyny, sexism, anti-English feeling, religious intolerance (especially towards Catholics although she was not one herself) and cultural cringe. During her 17 years at the Sydney Hospital, Osburn endured a Royal Commission (1873), regular inquiries into hospital administration and the role of the nurses, and personal attacks in the newspapers. The endless power struggles and bitter infighting that this woman was subjected to between the doctors and male managers within the Hospital, the fact she had control over the nurses but not over the male orderlies and kitchen hands made Osburn's job almost impossible. |
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It is hard to fathom the vitriol levelled against Lucy Osburn that springs from the pages of this book. For years, different people, for different reasons, attempted to run her out of town. The fact that she stayed for so long in Sydney is testament to her tenacity, strong personality, and belief in her mission to establish the Nightingale nursing system in the colony. Osburn may have been highly spirited, energetic, a bit of a gossip and sometimes indiscreet and hasty in her personal correspondence to Nightingale and others but these were, in my view, minor character flaws. The story unveiled in this book is worthy of any political thriller, with the scare mongering of various politicians and the medical establishment of Sydney town pitted against Henry Parkes (whose political fortunes ebbed and flowed throughout the period) and his 'Lady' nursing Superintendent, Lucy Osburn. |
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What surprised me most, however, was Lucy Osburn's deteriorating relationship with Florence Nightingale, a central figure, who looms large in this book. Osburn was cut loose by Nightingale, who was, in my view, a sycophantic, manipulative woman who took to her bed after her Crimean War exploits, and ruled the emerging nursing profession as a virtual recluse for decades afterwards. I came away thinking little of Nightingale and sorry for what Osburn endured at the hands of the British nursing establishment. Nursing politics has always been fraught, especially in Britain over professionalism and training towards the end of the nineteenth century. I have encountered some of these frenetic views, and Nightingale's influence, in my own research on Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the registration of nurses' debates at the turn of the century in Britain. I highly recommend this book for all those interested in nursing history and women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century. |
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| University of Western Sydney |
MELANIE OPPENHEIMER | |
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