What Became of the Lady? The Interwar Period, 1919–1939

Referring to the Nurses’ Registration Act (1919), Dr. Addison, Minister of Health, emphasised in a speech to district nurses in London that it was:

essential that “nurses should be adequately paid-the system which paid a nurse at the rate of a scullery maid was wrong” and he implored nurses to be “citizens first and nurses second,” declaring as a professional man that, “the bane of professions was that their members were professionals first and citizens second.”1