Nursing in Central Africa and Ceylon

SOPHIA CHARLOTTE McLAUGHLIN (1845-1929) studied at the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St Thomas' Hospital in London. I guess she was there for two years because she appears in the centre of two group photographs with the same doctors but different nurses and a different dog. The portrait below left has been extracted from one of the photographs.

Sophia joined the Universities' Mission to Central Africa in 1888 as a nurse at the mission's headquarters on Likoma Island in Lake Nyasa, now in Tanzania. On her way she stopped at the mission school in Matope, Malawi, to distribute prizes.

A year later the Mission's Bishop Charles Smythies visited Likoma. One missionary "rejoiced that his Bishop saw the people in their normal state of inattentiveness to their message, behaving no better than usual, and yet blessed the work."

After a feast in 1892 a crow picked up a piece of porridge with a live ember in it and dropped it on the thatched roof of the headquarters dining room. Buildings not destroyed in the ensuing fire were burned in a subsequent incident on Guy Fawkes Day. Sophia was therefore sent off to work at the mission's newly built hospital in Zanzibar, where slavery was still practiced.

The next year Sophia left the Mission. She went to work at the Civil Hospital in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The wards facing the administration block that are shown at the bottom of the page were her responsibility. The interior of one of the wards is pictured below. A late portrait of Sophie is on the right.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
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