Dame Agnes HUNT Without Leaving in Their Wake Some Enemies and Detractors but Frank Holdsworth Left None

Who’s Who in Orthopedics and affection. Indeed, this applied to everyone ugly uncivilised North,” he would say, “or they’ll who worked with him, including the many all come up from the South and spoil it.” foreign surgeons who came for a period of train- He was very happy in his home and family life. ing in his department. He left behind his wife Marjorie, herself a York- He was essentially a modest man and although shire woman endowed with many of his own ster- he had so strong a personality and such gifts of ling qualities, his son John and his daughter Mary. leadership, he had that sense of humility about his own achievements that is so characteristic of many great men. Indeed, he was always faintly surprised at finding himself famous and sought after, and although he knew for years that the writing was on the wall, he refused to make any concessions. To the despair of friends and medical advisers alike, he continued to drive himself as hard as ever in the many high offices to which he was called—President of the British Orthopedic Association, Senior Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Examiner to the College and to many universities apart from his own, and a much sought after lecturer in many parts of the world. Even in his last year he visited the United States twice and on the last occasion was made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons—an honor very rarely awarded to surgeons outside that country. His knighthood in 1967, followed by a professorship in 1969 in his own university, made a fitting climax to a brilliant career. Few people go so far Dame Agnes HUNT without leaving in their wake some enemies and detractors but Frank Holdsworth left none. 1867–1948 Perhaps the secret lay in the fact that he was com- pletely devoid of guile or malice, that he never Believing that a fortune might be made in contrived a situation in his life, and that at the end Queensland by breeding Angora goats, Mrs. of it all, as Professor Sir Frank Holdsworth, Rowland Hunt, widow of the Shropshire squire he was essentially the same warm, unaffected, whose estate lay in fertile plains between the approachable and very human person as the villages of Baschurch and Ruyton-Eleven-Towns, young man from Bradford who started the ortho- gathered those of her 11 children who still pedic department at Sheffield Royal Infirmary accepted an imperious domination and arrived in more than 30 years earlier. Brisbane, intent on the purchase of a desert island. Of his other interests, he liked traveling, No desert island was for sale. No Angora goats fishing, history, Westerns, good cooking, good were in Brisbane—indeed there were none conversation and good companionship. As a throughout the length and breadth of Australia; founder member of The Journal of Bone and Joint but Mrs. Hunt refused to believe it and said Surgery (he was on the original editorial board), that if there were no goats there ought to be. She he was also a founder member of the traveling did, however, weaken in her resolve and compro- club derived from it, and those of us who traveled mized by purchasing a 50-acre paddock in which with him will remember what a good companion to rear chickens. The stock was not good, and he was. He could be equally stimulating and many chickens were born with crippling defor- provocative whether defending the Plantagenets, mities, but Mrs. Hunt was undaunted and when whom he greatly admired, or extolling the beau- she decided to amputate limbs with a carving ties of his native Yorkshire and the inestimable knife and replace them with peg-legs made of advantages of living and working there, which he Bryant and May matches, it was the duty of always insisted should remain a carefully guarded her youngest daughter Agnes to administer the secret. “Don’t ever explode this myth about the anesthetic. 147 Who’s Who in Orthopedics Agnes was then aged 16. She had been bred in North Wales, and the West London Hospital, a school of hard and rigid discipline. Her mother Hammersmith. Her one and only term of night disliked children—“disliked them when they duty was devoted to a midnight game of catch-as- were coming, during their arrival, and most catch-can round the wardroom table, chased by an intensely after they had arrived.” Her father epileptic madman who threw inkpots at her while “laughed immoderately at any accident.” Her she threw jugs of water at him. At that time nurses brothers induced a robust spirit of fearlessness; lived in primitive conditions and engaged in and the only governess who served the family astonishingly long hours of duty; the evening with efficiency gave notice because the children meal consisted of bread, cheese, and beer. “were allowed to kill themselves in too many dif- The life was hard and arduous, and was indeed ferent ways.” When Agnes was aged 10 she a sacrifice. So impressed was this young girl with developed septicemia and infective arthritis of the the adverse conditions under which nurses served hip joint with high fever, sinus formation, and that she made a vow: “If ever I rise to be Matron, rapid destruction and dislocation of the joint; but no girl shall ever be the worse in health because within 9 months her bath chair was harnessed to of her work among the sick. This vow I kept.” a pony, which was raced until the chair was over- This vow, Dame Agnes Hunt, you did indeed turned, and within 12 months she was playing ice- keep. Today, in the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt hockey—on a home-made sledge, keeping goal. Orthopaedic Hospital the prowess of a nurse in In later years she wrote of her mother: “Her psy- the hockey field is almost as important as her skill chology of childhood amounted almost to a crime in the operating theater. Never was a staff of girls but her treatment of me as a cripple was beyond more able, more happy, and more ready to give praise. I was never allowed to pity myself or con- of their best. sider myself different. My brothers and sisters It was in Rhyl, on the sea-coast of North Wales, were never made to fetch and carry for me, and I that two fundamental principles of the nursing joined in their play.” It is true that at this age of chronic illness were learned—open air and Agnes Hunt began her “apprenticeship to crip- happiness. The Royal Alexandra Hospital was pledom and the great education of pain”; she was perhaps the first hospital for cripples ever to advo- destined to limp her way through life with stick cate fresh air as an integral part of treatment; and or crutch; but already she had learned a first prin- it was the teaching of Miss Graham, one of the ciple—the joy of life despite disability—and this founders, that “no nurse is worth her salt if she was to be her great contribution to medicine. has not the joy of life within her and the power When Mrs. Hunt decided that the Australian of sharing it with her patients.” In due course continent had failed to live up to expectation, Agnes Hunt qualified. She was awarded the Agnes knew that “you might as well try to stop queen’s badge and brassard, and spent a year in Niagara as stop my mother when once she had Northamptonshire nursing a typhoid epidemic. made up her mind.” But a proud spirit of deter- After resting in bed for 6 months on the instruc- mination in the mother had been inherited by the tion of a heart specialist, she engaged once more daughter and, when Mrs. Hunt decided to return as a district nurse in treating 500 victims of a to England, Agnes Hunt decided to stay in smallpox epidemic. Tasmania to look after her brother Tom. She was In 1900, “mother broke it to me that she was influenced in this decision by an accident sus- becoming old and deaf and intended to live with tained by a young man who was felling trees. “In me. This was rather a blow.” It was a blow splitting a big tree, one of the wedges slipped and because at first it appeared that the daughter’s the great trunk closed over his hand, holding him career of nursing might be ended; there could be fast. The poor lad’s axe was just out of reach. He no more travel and there could be no more respon- was found dead 2 months later and from the sibility as a district nurse. But, on reflection, this marks on his wrist he had tried to gnaw his hand indomitable girl realized that it might still be pos- off. I decided to stop.” sible to live at home and yet to nurse—and thus In 1887, at the age of 20, having received three began the story of Baschurch, the pioneer conva- proposals of marriage in 1 day—“not very eligi- lescent home from which developed and spread ble ones” she wrote “but still rather a record,” she throughout Great Britain and the world the ideals left the Tasmanian ranch and returned home with of country orthopedic hospitals, after-care clinics, her brother. Training as a nurse began as lady- preventive treatment, and resettlement of the dis- pupil at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Rhyl, abled.

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