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20 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com June 10–July 15, 2019 PROFILES IN NURSING by Amanda Ghosh B orn wealthy, Agnes Jones dedicated her short life to caring for some of England's most desperate citizens. Her tenacity, will and faith helped to trans- form English healthcare, earning her the deep personal regard of Florence Nightingale herself. The Horrors of the Workhouse If you've ever read the novels of Charles Dickens, you might recall his vivid depiction of English workhouses. Originally con- ceived as a form of public relief for the poor, workhouses eventually became little better than prisons where the destitute paid for their meager room and board — which they were rarely allowed to leave — with endless, menial manual labor. Children as young as 9 were put to work picking cotton or weaving. The elderly could be forced to work until the age of 80. Workhouse hospitals were the grimmest of all. Intended to segregate the sick from healthier inmates who could still be made to work, the hospitals were only for the desperate. For many, to die in the street was a more appealing prospect than to die in a workhouse hospital. Nursing in these hospitals was usually assigned to able-bodied female inmates, who had no training and little enthusiasm for the unpleasant, dangerous work, con- soling themselves with drink and petty theft. The wards were packed with hun- dreds of patients, sometimes crammed three to a bed, waiting to die. Healing Ministry Agnes Jones's early life was a far cry from the workhouses. The child of a British Army officer and an Irishwoman, she spend much of her childhood in Mauritius and then a country house in Fahan, County Donegal, Ireland. She went to school in Stratford-upon-Avon (birthplace of William Shakespeare) and at 19 became a teacher in Dublin. This was the era of the terrible Irish Potato Famine, which killed more than 10 percent of the Irish population and left mil- lions dispossessed. Jones became a lay nurse, treating sick or injured children in her area. At age 14, she wrote, "Father says I should know a path my life is taking. I believe my life will be spent caring for the sick." Jones had been deeply religious since childhood, so she regarded nursing as a form of ministry, often administering bible readings along with bandages. In 1860, she entered the Kaiserwerth Deaconess Institute near Düsseldorf, Germany, where Florence Nightingale had trained some years earlier. Although her mother was not enthusias- tic about her religious calling or interest in caring for the poor and the sick — Jones was an attractive, well-spoken young woman of marriageable age — Jones con- tinued pursuing her calling at the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission. In 1862, she joined St. Thomas's Hospital as a Nightingale Nurse, whom Nightingale later described as one of her "best pupils." By the winter of 1864, Jones had already been the superintendent of three different small hospitals, with a focus on what we would now call critical care. Agnes Jones (1832–1868) The Nurse Who Brought Dignity to Liverpool's Grim Workhouse Infirmaries CATALYST FOR REFORM Agnes Jones took over as infirmary matron only reluctantly, but quickly rose to the challenge, working 18-hour days to overhaul the institution. Greatly impressed by Jones's efforts, Florence Nightingale lobbied parliament for legal reforms to English public healthcare.