The social exploits and behaviour of nurses during the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902

During the Second Anglo-Boer War, two key watchwords associated with serving nurses were ‘duty’ and ‘respectability’.² At the commencement of war, women from across the Empire, including trained nurses, saw the opportunity to travel to South Africa to experience war and work alongside men as their equals, caught up in a patriotic fervour to defend and expand the Queen’s lands. The war, which resulted from years of ambitious encounters over gold deposits, Afrikaner expansionism and continued conflict between long-term settlers in South Africa and newly arrived British subjects, had an inevitability about it.³ Conflict had followed conflict in the previous