The Glasgow Science Festival is a STEAMS festival, celebrating Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths and Social Science. The 2025 theme for the festival was ‘Glasgow’s Celebrating’ to coincide with the city reaching 850 years old. This seemed a clear opportunity to raise the profile of the nurses of Glasgow who have so often been written out of history.
We ran our tabletop activity over two days at the Riverside Museum. We identified nurses from Glasgow who had contributed to the development of the profession and to the health of the city. Most of those selected were born between 1770 and 1900. This included Agnes Harkness-Reston, a Scottish nurse who accompanied her husband in 1810 to the Fort of Matagorda, Spain. It also included Rebecca Strong, OBE, Matron of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary who developed a pioneering approach to nurse education. Another nurse was Helen Gregory Smith, CBE, RRC, who trained at the Western Infirmary Glasgow. She became Senior Principal Matron of the Territorial Force Nursing Service 3rd Scottish General Hospital, Stobhill. This role involved maintaining 1,000 beds for wounded soldiers.
Two University of Glasgow student nurses, Naomi Coyle and Hannah Eksteen, and a volunteer, Hannah Adams, researched and prepared the biographies which ran as a slide show. This was a lovely opportunity for them to find out more about nursing history. They also attended the event and had many children apply a triangular bandage on them to practice their first aid skills.
We had an old district nurses’ bag and a new district nurses’ bag with their contents to show the changes in the role of community nurses. Michelle, as a recent practising community nurse was able to share some of the ways the role has changed since the 1900s – and in many ways how it is still similar except with ‘more plates to spin’ now. Visitors enjoyed picking up and exploring the items in the bag.
We prepared a card sorting activity of significant public health, nursing and medical discoveries in Glasgow and developed a timeline to map these on. One boy who came to the event did say he had just been learning about nurses at school and was keen to get some more names to take back to his teacher. Grandparents who had worked in local hospitals and had brought their grandchildren to the event shared their stories of working in the NHS and there always seems such a warmth in their storytelling about how much they enjoyed this time.
Sue also ran a two hour walking tour with Annette, Chair of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis focusing on The Health of a City and Those Who Shaped It. An estimated 50,000 people are buried in the Necropolis, next to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and Glasgow Cathedral. We visited the headstones of those who navigated poverty, poor sanitation and overcrowding to bring healthcare to the citizens of Glasgow and shared the stories of their amazing achievements. From the nursing perspective this included Katherine Edith McCall Anderson, RRC, who served in field hospitals in South Africa during the Second Boer War, and later became matron of the Lady Hardinge Hospital for sick and wounded Indian soldiers in Hampshire. She is listed on the same stone as her father where she is only described as ‘daughter’. The tour also looked at the stone of Helen Marshall Rough who created the Glasgow & West of Scotland Co-Operation for Trained Nurses towards the end of 1892.
In the Necropolis there are three monuments which list 16 nurses and domestics from Glasgow Royal Infirmary who are buried in the cemetery. Two of the monuments overlook the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The oldest of the stones has staff who died between 1872 and 1887. Five of the staff died in their twenties from infectious diseases, likely contracted through their work, and all came from some distance outside Glasgow – for example Orkney, Caithness, and Peterhead. On one of the other Glasgow Royal Infirmary monuments Mary J. Shaw is mentioned. She died in 1895 aged only 23 years from accidental carbolic acid poisoning. She was feeling unwell and took a dose of castor oil and mixed it with what she believed to be lemon juice, which was unfortunately carbolic acid which she herself had set aside for use in the ward. Remedies were immediately applied but the shock to her system resulted in death within a quarter of an hour after the corrosive had been taken.
Due to health and safety restrictions numbers on a tour are limited to 30 and we were oversubscribed so hope to run this again soon. Feedback from those who attended has been overwhelmingly positive. Many said that they had never visited the Necropolis before and had always meant to and this had been a wonderful opportunity.
Sue Campbell talking about the nurses on one of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary stones
Michelle Inglis and two University of Glasgow student nurses, Hannah and Naomi, at the pioneering community nurses table at the Glasgow Science Festival
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