Nurse Henrietta Stockdale: Pioneer of First State Registration for Nurses

In 1891 the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope became the first place in the world to pass legislation registering nurses and midwives. The driving force behind it was Sister Henrietta Stockdale. Nurses worldwide hailed the law as a breakthrough for the profession, yet today few have heard her name.

Registration matters because it puts nursing on a professional footing. When formal training first began, every hospital set its own curriculum and length of study, so employers and the public had to judge a nurse by the reputation of whichever hospital trained her. Anyone could take a nursing job, trained or not. State registration gives the nurse an acknowledged status, confirms she has met a defined standard of education, protects the public from the untrained, and holds the profession to consistent standards.

Who Was Sister Henrietta Stockdale?

Henrietta was born in 1847 in Nottinghamshire, England, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who served small villages. The family was never well-off, and her father handled most of the children's early education. She showed early on that she was intelligent, thoughtful, and commanding, and with no formal schooling available she largely educated herself by reading whatever she could find.

An Early Missionary Call

At 15 she attended a meeting with the Bishop of the Orange River Mission in South Africa and was so moved by its work that she joined as an associate. As one account put it, "From that time, when she was only fifteen, until her death nearly fifty years afterward, she gave her prayers, her thoughts, her time, and finally herself to the Bloemfontein Mission, and died in its cause."

She reached the mission field in 1874 as an associate of the Order of St Michael and All Angels, the first order established on South African soil. Asked by a relative before she left whether she would become a religious sister, she replied, "I think not; you see I may live sixty years longer." She took her vows in 1877.

The Start of Her Nursing Career

Before sailing, Henrietta completed a few months of nurse training at Clewer Hospital and at Great Ormond Street Hospital for children. In Bloemfontein she was assigned to teaching but longed to care for the sick. The chance came in 1877, when the order was asked to provide nursing in the diamond fields of Kimberley. More than 30,000 people had crowded into a hot, dusty, dangerous landscape, and many lived in illness and poverty.

A group from the order took over the wood-and-iron hospital, but Henrietta was soon asked to do district work. She worked long hours in the tents and shacks of the diggers' camp until she contracted camp fever, or typhoid. Sent back to England to recover, she spent several months at University College Hospital in London gaining more nursing experience and studying how nurses were trained.

Carnarvon Hospital in Kimberley

In 1879 Henrietta was put in charge of Carnarvon Hospital in Kimberley, later Kimberley Hospital, and here she began the work that defined the rest of her life.

She cared deeply for her patients. She told her nurses that cheerfulness would "do more good to their patients than a dose of medicine," and on her rounds she greeted and asked after every patient. Asked whether nurses also helped patients' souls, she answered, "Why, yes, or we might just as well nurse a lot of broken-down old horses."

She worried about her nurses too. They were overworked in hard conditions, so she advocated and raised funds for a proper nurses' residence and arranged shifts to leave time for rest, recreation, exercise, and worship.

Founding Professional Nursing Education in South Africa

Henrietta launched the first professional nurse training in South Africa at Carnarvon Hospital. Training started at two years, and by 1889 the school became one of the first to adopt the three-year program advocated by the British Nursing Association. Like the Nightingale-trained nurses in England, Kimberley-trained nurses were in high demand and went on to run hospitals and establish training schools across South Africa.

Campaigning for State Registration

Henrietta found a close friend and mentor in Ethel Gordon (Bedford) Fenwick, who launched the British Nursing Association in 1887 to win legal recognition for the profession. Henrietta joined and backed its aims. When she learned that the legislation governing medical practitioners was under review, she campaigned to have nurses and midwives included. Through a strong personality and what observers called quiet diplomacy, she won over nurses and medical and political leaders. In 1891 the Act passed, providing for the licensing and registration of medical practitioners, apothecaries, dentists, chemists and druggists, midwives, and nurses.

South Africa thereby became the first country in the world to make legal provision for a nursing and midwifery curriculum, approval of training schools, and standardized examinations for entry onto the register.

A Founding Member of the ICN

In her 1920 history of nursing, Lavinia Dock wrote: "Sister Henrietta was a woman of fine culture and seriousness of character. Her personality made a deep impression on nurses, when, at international meetings in England in 1899, she told of the steps by which they had gained what was then so great a novelty, the first state recognition of the profession of nursing."

Henrietta was an honorary member of the Matrons' Council of Great Britain and Ireland, at whose 1899 meeting the International Council of Nurses was founded as a platform for nurses pursuing professional self-government. She was elected to the provisional committee that drafted the ICN constitution.

Recognition

Henrietta raised funds for a hospital chapel, inaugurated in 1887. Later named after her, it still stands at Kimberley Hospital as an official heritage site. In 1970 the South African Nursing Association funded a statue in her honor, sculpted by Dr. Jack Penn. It stands in the grounds of St Cyprian's Cathedral in Kimberley, one of the few statues anywhere honoring the work of religious sisters.