The Development of Nursing

The development of nursing in South Africa in the late nineteenth century formed the professional and organisational backdrop against which British military nursing operated during the South African War. This page outlines the evolution of civilian, colonial, and military nursing structures relevant to the period, focusing on those developments that shaped the deployment, expectations, and experiences of nurses who later served with British forces. Wider political and military histories of the conflict are not repeated here.

Colonial and Imperial Nursing

Victorians saw the Empire, along with the export of professional, financial and commercial services, as one of their glories. In reality the Empire was a drain on Britain’s resources in terms of the cost of defence and administration, grants, and the cheap services offered to member states. As the nineteenth century progressed there was a move, not always successfully, to concentrate on the commercial aspects of Empire rather than territorial acquisitions.

This period also saw an outflow of professionals, including nurses, and this was a cause for concern. Many nurses travelling to work overseas would have been placed by the Colonial Nursing Association (CNA). All CNA applicants were white, British, single women. Applicants were accepted “based on assumptions about the nurse’s class, age, training, personal attributes, manner and characteristics”.

For these nursing sisters, life in the colonies could be isolated and lonely. They were white ‘ladies’ but had little in common with other colonial women and carried out work which made them less than ‘lady-like’ in status. They often had little support other than from the local ‘Association’, which reinforced Victorian values of the lady nurse of good character. There is evidence of nurses going to South Africa and, through marriage or favourable appointments, staying permanently.

British Nurses as Agents of Empire

British nurses in the South African setting were enmeshed in imperialism by their role in dealing with indigenous populations and through their relationships with other colonial officers and families in a gendered medical hierarchy shaped by racially mediated discourses of sexual propriety. In this sense they may be understood as ‘Agents of Empire’. They helped to establish and reinforce British control over the bodies and cultures of colonised societies in South Africa, and it is noteworthy that many nurses were working in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal at the outbreak of the Boer War.

Some of the British nurses who travelled to work in South Africa would later appear in the prosopography, having cared for sick and wounded British soldiers during the war. Others remained permanently in South Africa, contributing to a steady influx of British-trained nurses before and after the conflict. Some of these nurses took leading roles in the development of nursing as a profession in South Africa, including the establishment of nurse training schemes discussed below.