Dame Agnes Gwedoline Hunt, DBE RRC

Dame Agnes Gwendoline Hunt DBE RRC (31 December 1866 – 24 July 1948) is generally recognised as the first orthopaedic nurse.

• 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 Humfrey of Stoke Albany, Northamptonshire, England.
• She 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. She was disabled from osteomyelitis of the hip that she suffered from as a child aged 10 following septicaemia.
• She returned to England from Australia In 1887
• ... began training as a "lady pupil" nurse at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Rhyl, Wales.
• Opened a convalescent home, attached to the Salop Infirmary at Shrewsbury, for crippled children at Florence House (a family property) in Baschurch in 1900
• 1901 - sought treatment for her own condition from a Liverpool surgeon, Robert Jones, inviting him to visit the convalescent home. He began travelling there on a regular basis to provide treatment to the children.
• By 1907, they had built an operating theatre and introduced the diagnostic use of X-rays in 1913.
• In 1910 itwas approved as a training school by the Chartered Society of Massage and during World War I, Florence House was used to treat wounded soldiers.
• 1918: Hunt was awarded the Royal Red Cross for her contribution during the war.[
• 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. The hospital also provided training for nurses. Later, a school begun for the children developed into a training college for disabled adults, Derwen College. The hospital was used once again to treat wounded soldiers during World War II. Following an extensive fire in 1948, the hospital underwent a period of reconstruction and expansion, developing into what is now called The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital.
• Agnes Hunt was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1926.
• She 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,-

"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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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jones_and_Agnes_Hunt_Orthopaed...

1901 Census

Class: RG13; Piece: 2551; Folio: 60; Page: 10 - Florence House, Baschurch

Living with her were her mother and a niece Dorothy Gladys Hunt.

References, Sources and Further reading

• http://www.newsmedianews.com/Shropshire/bphistory.php
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Hunt
• http://hharp.org/library/gosh/general/convalescent-homes.html
• http://web.archive.org/web/20060930091834/http://www3.shropshire-cc...