Originally published in 1960, this is a graphic and humorous story of district nursing from its beginning, with the first nurse engaged to work in the slums of nineteenth-century Liverpool, up to the time of publication. Mrs Stocks records how ‘our nurse’ had been and still was a familiar and beloved figure in busy cities and remote rural areas throughout the United Kingdom and was rapidly assuming a similar position in many other parts of the world.

William Rathbone of Liverpool early recognized the need for a central organization to recruit and train district nurses and became the father of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses, or as it became, the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing (now Queen’s Institute of Nursing). The background of its formation gives a fascinating glimpse of different classes of Victorian England. Mrs Stocks describes how Queen Victoria, the Institute’s first Patron, conveyed her wishes to the ‘top people’ who devised and organized the service with the inflexible guidance of Florence Nightingale. At the other end of the scale, she tells of some of the appalling conditions found in the homes by the pioneer nurses. She describes how the Queen’s Institute grew from strength to strength in spite of buffeting by high political winds, until at the time it played an important part in preserving the nation’s health. Today it is a registered charity dedicated to improving the nursing care of people in the home and community.

At the time of publication Mary Stocks (later Baroness Stocks) was a distinguished economist and broadcaster; she had sat on a number of government committees and had been a member of the BBC’s General Advisory Council since 1952.