Manuscript autobiography of Dorothy Ross

The single item in this collection comprises 'The Pattern of a Life', the unpublished autobiography of Dorothy Ross. It was written by Dortothy Ross in 1982, and describes her childhood and education, her training as a nurse, her missionary training, and her nursing career in Nigeria and in Britain down to her retirement from the Church Missionary Society in 1955. The manuscript is believed to have been typed by her brother Arthur following her death and was distributed among her family.

Dorothy Ross (1896-1982) was born Dorothy Jewett in Camberwell, London, and was educated at Mary Datchelor Girls' School, Camberwell. After training as a nurse in 1918-1923, she joined the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and was trained as a medical missionary at the CMS's training college in Highbury, London (1923-1924). She subsequently served as a nurse with the CMS in south-eastern Nigeria from 1924 to 1939 and from 1941 to 1955. During the first period (1924-1939), she worked as a nurse at the CMS's Iyi-Enu Hospital near Onitsha (1924-1929), and then at a girls' school and maternity clinic among the Isoko people in the village of Bethel in the Niger Delta (later moving with the school and clinic to Igbudu near Warri). In 1939 Dorothy Jewett returned to Britain, where she worked as a matron at an emergency hospital in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire before returning to Nigeria in 1941. In 1941-1943 she continued maternity work at Igbudu, including a period in 1942-1943 at a CMS leper colony in the Oji River Settlement. From 1943 to 1946 she ran a maternity clinic at Oleh. In 1946 she was appointed Sister Supervisor of the Niger Diocesan Maternity Service, responsible for organizing and developing district maternity homes. She returned to Iyi-Enu Hospital in 1952 and served there as Matron until 1955, being involved in the re-organization of the Hospital. Following her retirement from the CMS in 1955, Dorothy Jewett returned to Britain, where she later married Robert Ross, a civil servant.

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Copyright held by Estate of Dorothy Ross