Dame Agnes Hunt
| Dame Agnes Gwendoline Hunt | |
|---|---|
| Born |
31 December 1866 London, England, UK |
| Died | 24 July 1948 (aged 81) Baschurch, Shropshire, England, UK |
| Education | Royal Alexandra Hospital, Rhyl, Wales |
| Medical career | |
| Profession | Nurse |
| Institutions | The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital |
| Specialism | Orthopaedic nursing |
| Notable prizes |
DBE Royal Red Cross |
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.
She 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 Humfrey of Stoke Albany, Northamptonshire, England.
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. She was disabled from osteomyelitis of the hip that she suffered from as a child following septicaemia.
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, 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.
In 1901, she sought treatment for her own condition from a Liverpool surgeon, Robert Jones. 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, Florence House was used to treat wounded soldiers.
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