Howard Rein Lecture | ‘A helping hand to those who are in great distress’: Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession Event

Time:

18:00 to 19:30

Date:

2026-10-13 18:00:00

Venue:

Online

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Event details

Join The Parkes Institute for the annual Howard Rein Lecture.

Nearly 90 years after the November 1938 pogrom, knowledge of the persecution of the Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust have become essential learning across the globe. I would hope is also a growing understanding of what it was like to be a refugee - but it is not clear this knowledge has led to more compassionate action. The current rhetoric would suggest our understanding of the horrors of the past no longer carry resonance.

This talk focuses on one cohort of refugees, those young women who fled Nazi Europe and entered the nursing profession here in Britain. Very little has been written about these women, yet nursing was seen by many of them as a valuable career choice and several became leaders of the profession in the latter decades of the twentieth century. It will consider the refugees entry into the profession, the frequent antagonism towards their recruitment by hospitals at a time of severe nursing shortages and their resilience in the face of anti-refugee attitudes and antisemitism. Whilst not conflating the past with the present, this talk aims to illuminate the essentiality of migrant labour and the need for empathetic policies.

Speaker Bio

Dr Jane Brooks is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. She has been a historian of nursing since the late 1990s. She has written widely in the discipline, on topics including the history of nursing education, older adult care in the mid-twentieth century and for the past decade and a half on nursing during the Second World War. She is co-editor of One Hundred Years of Nursing Wartime Practices with Christine Hallett, which was awarded the Mary Roberts prize from the American Association for the History of Nursing. She is the author of two monographs, published by Manchester University Press: Negotiating Nursing: sisters and soldiers in the Second World War and more recently, Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: a gendered opportunity , which was awarded the Lavinia Dock award, also from the American Association for the History of Nursing. Dr Brooks is editor of Nursing History Review and has previously held positions on the boards of the UK, US and European history of nursing associations and the Royal College of Nursing History of Nursing Forum.