Redfern Davies
Born in Birmingham in 1834, John Redfern Davies was the eldest son of John Birt Davies, the Birmingham coroner. A doctor, like his father, Redfern Davies was viewed by his contemporaries as one of the brightest and most able young British surgeons. After training in Birmingham, London and Paris, he was keen to devote his skills to helping the poor. He accepted a post as resident surgeon at the Birmingham workhouse infirmary.
One day in December 1860 he was thrown from his horse while on his way home from the workhouse, suffering concussion and serious injuries to his head and spine. After about six weeks his condition seemed to improve and he felt able to return to work, but he was still suffering intense neuralgic pain. He worked on for another year, but eventually decided to take an extended break in an attempt to regain his former state of health.
He travelled to the United States where he volunteered his services as surgeon to the Federal forces engaged in the American Civil War. He spent four months working at a hospital in the city of Frederick, Maryland, where he treated soldiers wounded in the bloody civil war battles of South Mountain and Antietam. There he gained a great deal of experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, publishing papers in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
In 1863, he returned home and volunteered his services to Walsall Cottage Hospital. Walsall was a rough, dirty industrial town in the centre of the Black Country, about nine miles north of Birmingham. The small voluntary hospital specialised in treating workers in the hazardous heavy industries that had developed around the town. It was staffed by local doctors and resident nurses. The nurses came from an Anglican order in north-east England. They had received little in the way of formal training, relying mainly on practical experience gained in a convalescent home.
Sister Dora
Redfern Davies joined the Walsall hospital at about the same time as vicar’s daughter, Dorothy Pattison, arrived there to take up her first proper nursing post. Dorothy, her nine sisters and two brothers had suffered unhappy childhoods at the hands of an excessively controlling father and timid mother. Her brothers had managed to escape the oppressive family home, but the girls had to put up with their father’s black moods and his strange determination that they should never marry. By time Dorothy was twenty-nine years old, she had known little of life beyond the gloomy rectory.
She had a long-held ambition to become a nurse. The only way she could see to achieving this was to join a religious order, so she left her home to sign up as a novice at the Anglican Sisterhood of the Good Samaritan based at Coatham, near Redcar. There she underwent rudimentary training and gained some practical nursing experience.
In 1865, still only a novice in the sisterhood, Dorothy was sent to Walsall Cottage Hospital to replace a nursing sister who had fallen ill. She immediately threw herself into the role heart and soul, impressing everyone with her energy and commitment. Local people had been suspicious of the sisters, questioning their motives for coming to Walsall, but Dorothy’s evident commitment to their health and welfare won them over. Known to everyone in Walsall as Sister Dora, she soon took charge of the hospital, working all hours to care for the patients and improve the nursing standards.
Engagement
Novices in the religious order did not have to take vows of celibacy and were free to marry. When Dorothy and Redfern Davies met, they were immediately attracted to each other. She was fascinated by his accounts of travels in Europe and America, and he taught her a great deal about diagnosis, treatments, surgical procedures and techniques. Both were independent, highly intelligent, idealistic and deeply committed to their patients. Both also possessed gifts of charm and persuasiveness. Eventually they agreed to marry.
However, they disagreed on religion. She retained a deep religious faith, but he was a humanist, a follower of Darwin and Huxley, who did not share her faith. Dorothy dreaded the thought of giving up her nursing career, as she would have to when she married. Reluctantly, after much introspection, she decided to break off the engagement. Redfern Davies’s reaction to this decision is not recorded, but on 15th October 1866 he resigned from the Walsall Cottage Hospital and returned to Birmingham. They were never to meet again.
Redfern Davies died on 3rd March 1867. His death was attributed to complications of the earlier riding accident, leading to an aneurysm. The Lancet said of him that ‘very few surgeons have displayed in the early years a more thorough appreciation of scientific surgery’. He was remembered fondly in Walsall too. The local press reported that he had performed his duties at the hospital with credit, referring to ‘his kindly disposition and gentlemanly manner’ which had won him many friends among his colleagues and his patients.
Meanwhile Dorothy remained resolutely single, continuing to deliver outstanding nursing care in Walsall until her death from breast cancer in 1878. She had achieved virtual cult status in the town and is still revered as a local heroine. Admired by Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, a friend of her brother, some believe she was the model for Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Eliot’s Middlemarch. She is commemorated in a statue in Walsall town centre – the first ever statue of a non-Royal female erected in England.
