Catharine Grace Loch, Royal Red Cross, Senior Lady Superintendent Queen Alexandra's Military Nursing Service for India : a memoir / edited by A.F. Bradshaw.

  • Loch, Catharine Grace, 1854-1904.
Date:
1905
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Catharine Grace Loch, Royal Red Cross, Senior Lady Superintendent Queen Alexandra's Military Nursing Service for India : a memoir / edited by A.F. Bradshaw. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    FEOM THE NOTE BY THE EDITOR I T was natural perhaps that it should have been proposed to * me to compile a memoir of the late Miss Catharine Grace Loch, R.R.C., formerly the Senior Lady Superintendent of Queen Alexandra’s Military Nursing Service for India, as my associa- tion ofticially with her continued over a period of seven years namely from the 28th March, 1888-the date of her arrival as chief pioneer of the Indian Nursing Service, at Rawai I’indi her future headquarters-to the 9th March, 1895. During the first four I happened to be the Principal Medical Officer of the Rawal Pindi Military District, and during the remainder of the time the P.M.O., Her Majesty’s Forces in India. . . . Miss Loch must have been a most satisfactory correspondent as she went so fully into interesting detail relating to her daily life and her experiences—especially impressions of travel. The extracts which 1 have made from Miss Loch’s Letters are so very many and so extremely copious that the Memoir has ecome jiractically an Autobiography, besides being iiiciden- Lilly a history of the early years of the Nursing Service Reyond sentences necessary for purposes of connexion, occa- sional compression, and here and there some small paraphras- ing suggested by sense of editorial responsibility, the words are her own. I found that no mere summary could at all convey to those interested in a record of her Life and Work an adequate presentment of the constant excitements, and anxieties of her official position in India, or of her lively enjoyment of travel • or, indeed, of the extent to which her duties, executive and administrative, combined with the local conditions of climate and long journeys, bore hardly on her powers of bodily endur- ance. Neither could any summary so well reveal as these extracts do the characteristics of her mind and disposition. • • • y her administrative ability, strikingly sound and tactful common sense, and by her decisive and level-headed judgement m complex and trying circumstances, she had obtained the high esteem of the medical authorities with whom she was brought into communication. Undoubtedly under a less able and kss judicious pioneer the Indian Nursing Service could not have achieved the marked .success which justified the Government of India in adding to the personnel and in ex- tending the areas of usefulness.