Nursing and Social Justice: A History of Refugee Health
16 Jun 2026, 18:00 - 19:30
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Join us for an online talk exploring the contribution of refugees and asylum seekers in healthcare.
Find out more about the contribution of refugees and asylum seekers in healthcare, in a special event for Refugee Week. Hear stories of Jewish refugee nurses from Jane Brooks, alongside the wider context of refugee health from Thomas Jones.
Jane Brooks will focus on the challenges Jewish women and girls who fled Nazi persecution faced from their escape and then arrival in Britain to their attempts to enter the nursing profession. In the 1930s and into the war years, Britain faced a stark shortage of nurses. In many ways the Jewish refugees were exactly the sort of women the nursing leadership wanted for the profession: they were well educated, cultured and from predominantly middle-class homes. However, they were also 'foreign' and marked by their refugee status. Many hospitals would not accept them. I therefore explore the difficulties they faced in their attempts to become nurses, not only from the profession, but also the government, influenced by fear of 'the other'.
Thomas Jones will show that throughout the long history of political and religious asylum in Britain, questions of public and personal health have stood out as amongst the most crucial issues governing the experience and reception of refugees. The nature of exile itself, often involving extended and unplanned travel, limited economic resources, moments of extreme danger and stress, and crowded and ad hoc accommodation, frequently pose serious challenges to the wellbeing of refugees. Meanwhile, perceptions of refugee ill-health have repeatedly inflected British debates about the desirability of offering asylum, with restrictionists often couching arguments for the expulsion of refugees in terms of quarantining and disease prevention. In response to these sanitary and political hazards, refugee organisations have often proactively provided health services for their own communities, from organising free social and medical care to the founding of dedicated hospitals and hospices. This talk will provide an overview of these recurrent themes in refugee history, with illustrative examples from across the past five centuries.
Dr Jane Brooks is a historian of nursing and has been researching the profession during the years of the Second World War for over 15 years. Her talk today is based on her research which was the basis for the 2024 publication, A Gendered Opportunity: Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession. The research for the monograph was supported by the Barbara Brodie Fellowship from the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia and was awarded the 2025 Lavinia Dock Prize from the American Association for the History of Nursing.
Dr Thomas C Jones is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Buckingham. He has published widely on the history of refugees in Britain from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and in 2026-27 will undertake a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in support of his research project ‘The Evolution of Asylum in British History’.
Image: Refugees at Millisle Farm during the Second World War, including Edith Bown (Imperial War Museum)
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Page last updated - 08/06/2026
