THE MEDICAL MEMORIES ROADSHOW
‘To understand where we are today
We have to know where we have come from’
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DAME AGNES HUNT
CO-FOUNER OF THE
ROBERT JONES & AGNES HUNT
ORTHOPAEDIC HOSPITAL
OSWESTRY
"Another important landmark was the association between
Sir Robert Jones and Dame Agnes Hunt"
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"Dame Agnes Gwendoline Hunt DBE RRC (31 December 1866 – 24 July 1948) was a British nurse, who is generally recognised as the first Orthopaedic Nurse."
"Agnes Hunt was born in London, daughter and sixth of eleven children of Rowland Hunt (1828-1878) of Boreatton Park, Baschurch, a village in west Shropshire, England, and his wife, Florence Marianne, eldest daughter of Richard Buckley Humphrey of Stoke Albany, Northamptonshire, England".
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"Agnes Hunt was brought up at Boreatton Park until 1882, then at Kibworth Hall, Leicestershire before her widowed mother took the children to Australia, where they lived on a small farmstead."
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"She was disabled from osteomyelitis of the hip that she suffered from as a child following septicaemia."
NURSING
CAREER
SIR ROBERT JONES & DAME AGNES HUNT
by kind permission of
The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital Archives
"In 1887, she returned to England and began training as a "lady pupil" nurse at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Rhyl, Wales. She opened a convalescent home, the Baschurch Home, attached to the Salop Infirmary at Shrewsbury, for crippled children at Florence House (a family property) in Baschurch in 1900 which espoused the theory of open-air treatment.[7]"
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"In 1903, she sought treatment for her own condition from a Liverpool surgeon, Robert Jones.[8]"
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"She could see how his approach to Surgery would be beneficial to her work and so she invited him to visit the convalescent home and he eventually began travelling there on a regular basis to provide treatment to the children. By 1907, they had built an operating theatre and they introduced the diagnostic use of X-rays in 1913. In 1910 it was approved as a training school by the Chartered Society of Massage and during World War I, Baschurch Home was used to treat wounded soldiers as well as children In 1918, Hunt was awarded the Royal Red Cross for her contribution during the war.[10]"
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ROBERT JONES
AND
AGNES HUNT
ORTHOPAEDIC
HOSPITAL
"In 1919, the British Red Cross Society and the Shropshire War Memorial Fund provided financing to move the facility, renamed the Shropshire Orthopaedic Hospital, to a former military hospital at Park Hall, near Gobowen, Oswestry."
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"The hospital also provided training for nurses. The hospital was used once again to treat wounded soldiers during World War II."
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"Following an extensive fire in 1948,[11] the hospital underwent a period of reconstruction and expansion, "
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"Following the death of Sir Robert Jones the Hospital was renamed
The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital."
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HONOURS
"She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1926."
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DEATH
"DAME AGNES HUNT died in 1948 aged eighty-one. Her ashes were interred in the parish churchyard at Baschurch, where there is also a plaque inside the church, which reads:"
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"Reared in suffering thou shalt know how to solace others' woe. The reward of pain doth lie in the gift of sympathy."
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