Lucy Osburn

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Lucy Osburn (May 10, 1835 - December 22, 1891) was an English nurse trained by Florence Nightingale; she is regarded as the founder of nursing in Australia.^[1]

Osburn was born in Leeds; her father was Egyptologist William Osburn. She was educated at home by a mistress and learned several languages. She traveled to the Middle East in 1857 to visit a cousin, while there she enjoyed training horses.^[2] When Osburn returned to Europe she began to pursue her childhood interest in nursing. She trained at Kaiserswerth Hospital in Dusseldorf, and visited hospitals in Holland and Vienna. When she returned to England in 1866 she entered the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas's Hospital against her family's wishes^[2], at the school she received training in surgical nursing. In 1867 she studied midwifery at King's College Hospital.

Around this time New South Wales politician, Henry Parkes, wrote to Florence Nightingale requesting nurses for New South Wales. Nightingale recommended Osburn, and she was appointed lady superintendent for the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary. She and five other women, including Haldane Turriff, arrived in Sydney on March 5, 1866. Within a week of her arrival she was called upon to assist in the treatment of the Duke of Edinburgh following an attempt on his life.

By December she had trained 16 additional nurses at the first nurse training facility in the colony,^[3] but her efforts were soon obstructed by internal hospital politics where she was hindered by visiting surgeon Alfred Roberts, vermin problems and a series of political and social scandals. For example, Osburn's habit of dressing like a nun aroused suspicion in a colony where tensions between Catholics and Protestants were high,^[1] she was accused of bible-burning in the Protestant Standard after worshipping at the Christ Church St Laurence, a charge she was later cleared of.^[2] In 1873, at the royal commission on public charities, Roberts claimed that Nightingale had accused Osburn of 'having views of her own...beyond the Nightingale system'; she was however praised by the commission for bringing about a vast improvement in nursing.^[2] Conditions at the infirmary began to improve in 1874 and in 1881 the Sydney Hospital Act abolished the infirmary's old name and set up new conditions of management. In 1884 Osburn resigned and returned to England, where she continued to work as a nurse. She spent a total of 16 years and eight months working in New South Wales.

From 1886 to 1888 she was a district nurse in Bloomsbury, and then served as superintendent to the Southwark, Newington and Walworth District Nursing Association. In 1891 she paid a visit to her sister's boarding school in Harrogate, dying there from complications of diabetes.

In 2006 a book about her life in Sydney, Lucy Osburn, a lady displaced: Florence Nightingale's envoy to Australia, by Judith Godden was published.