Elizabeth Grace Neill (1846-1926)
Elizabeth Grace Campbell was born in Edinburgh in 1846, the eldest of nine children of a retired army colonel and his wife. She was educated at home and at private school in Rugby and was brought up to be independent and broad minded. Although she wished to study medicine, her father insisted that she become a nurse and she trained with the St John’s House Sisterhood in London, which supplied staff to King’s College and Charing Cross Hospitals. Elizabeth Campbell completed her training in both nursing and midwifery and was appointed Lady Superintendent at the Pendlebury Hospital for Children in Manchester where she remained for two years and married Dr Channing Neill. For a short time they lived on the Isle of Wight where her only son was born.
In 1886, Neill and her son joined her husband in Australia where he had established a practice. Her husband died in 1888 and she turned to journalism to earn a living, becoming a freelance journalist for the Brisbane Daily Telegraph and the Courier. In 1891, she was appointed by the Queensland Government to a Royal Commission on working conditions for shop and factory workers. Her knowledge of the workings of charitable aid and her work in journalism led to her appointment as the first woman Inspector of Factories in New Zealand in 1893. Over the next seven years she was involved in more commissions and the establishment of a Department of Health for New Zealand.
Neill was asked to establish a nursing service for New Zealand and in 1901 she helped to draft a bill for the New Zealand Parliament, which became the first Nurses’ Registration Act in the world. Three years later a Midwives’ Registration Act was passed and Neill was asked to set up the first state maternity hospital. The first St Helen’s Hospital, opened in June 1905, and was followed by three others across New Zealand within two years.
Neill was also a nursing leader and took an active part in nursing politics. She was a principal speaker at the nursing section of the International Council of Women’s Congress in London in 1899. She became an honorary member of the Matron’s Council of Great Britain and served on the committee which drafted the first constitutions of the International Council of Nurses.
At the end of 1906 ill health forced her to resign her position. During World War One she was Sister in Charge of the Children’s Ward at Wellington Hospital. After a long period of illness, Elizabeth Grace Neill died in August 1926.
In memory of her services to the people of New Zealand, and to the nurses in particular, the Grace Neill Memorial Library was established at the Nurses’ Postgraduate School in Wellington.
Reference
‘Neill, Elizabeth Grace’, from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand 1966, edited by A.H. McLintock, originally published in 1966. Te Ara – The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, updated 26-Sep-2006.