Perioperative Career and Recruitment Insights

In August 1915 Grace Wilson came ashore on Lemnos to run the nursing side of a hospital with few tents, no beds and almost no water. This is her verified story.

From a Civil War hospital corps aide to the highest-ranking African American officer in the US Army of his era, Allen Allensworth went on to found California's only African American-governed town. Part of Carejobz's Nurses Who Came Before Us series.

She qualified in June 1908 and was handed the operating theatre at Napier Hospital within months. She left it for a tent on a paddock, because that was where her people were dying of typhoid.

The verified story of Sister Alicia Mary Kelly, an Australian Army nurse awarded the Military Medal in 1917 for staying with her patients during sustained shelling at a Casualty Clearing Station.

Mary Adelaide Nutting built the structured, graded nurse training that every hospital specialty, including perioperative nursing, grew out of, and became the world's first professor of nursing in 1907.

Ann Stokes entered the United States Navy record during the Civil War as a Black woman who had escaped slavery. She served as a nurse aboard USS Red Rover, the Union Navy hospital ship on the Mississippi, decades before the Navy Nurse Corps formally existed.

Hester Maclean helped turn nursing in New Zealand from a collection of local practices into a profession with national standards, a professional journal, military nursing leadership and a stronger public voice.

Before Australia was a federation, Ellen Julia “Nellie” Gould was already helping build an organised military nursing service. She selected nurses for South Africa, led them through the Boer War and later returned to service during the First World War.

Alice Ross-King was a theatre sister before she was anything else. By 1914 she was in charge of a private hospital in Melbourne, having trained at the Alfred Hospital and worked as a ward sister, night superintendent and acting matron. Four years later she was one of the first Australian nurses to be awarded the Military Medal, for what she did in a canvas ward that had just been bombed. Every fact below is drawn from her service record, her diaries and the official record. B

Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole surviving nurse of the Bangka Island Massacre. This is her verified story, from Singapore in 1941 to a lifetime of nursing leadership.

Mary Eliza Mahoney became the first African American professionally trained nurse in the United States and helped open doors for future generations.

Ellen Dougherty became New Zealand’s first registered nurse in 1901 and is widely recognised as the first registered nurse in the world.

Florence Nightingale transformed nursing through sanitation, education, evidence and patient advocacy.