September 22, 2025, by Chloe

Back to School with Dinah Holt

Following on from our previous blog, which explored the arduous process of midwifery training in the mid-20th century through the letters of Dinah Holt, nurse and midwife extraordinaire, as she undertook her examinations in 1948 and 1949, today we’re stepping even further back in time to Dinah’s first term of nursing training in 1944…

MS 1047/1/1/2 Notebook of lecture notes on Nursing from Preliminary Training School, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, front cover; Apr. 1944-Nov. 1945

In April 1944, Dinah Holt had just begun her first year of preliminary nursing training at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. We can gain quite a lot of insight into this particular moment in her life through the fortunate survival of her lecture notes from this course, which form part of the Dinah Holt archive held at Manuscripts and Special Collections. As her notes show, nearly the process of becoming a nurse nearly 80 years ago was rather different than it is today.

MS 1047/1/1/2 Notebook of lecture notes on Nursing from Preliminary Training School, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, pages 1-2; Apr. 1944-Nov. 1945

We can tell from her neat, detailed notes that subjects covered at this early stage of the course included routine tasks such as the cleaning of bedding, the care of the ward, the admission of patients, the washing of patients, the prevention of bed sores, taking temperatures and pulses, sterilisation and the administration of drugs, but also tasks which seem – at least to my (admittedly uninformed) eye – rather more advanced and specific. These included dealing with fractures and haemorrhages, use of a catheter, preparing patients for operations, and even the appropriate treatment in the case of poisoning by a variety of different agents!  

MS 1047/1/3 D.M.J. Holt’s Experience Chart, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital; 18 Apr. 1944

We can see from her experience chart, which also forms part of the collection, that Dinah was required to get hands-on experience of many of the procedures she learned about, just as student nurses do today. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective – she was not required to but her poisoning skills to the test. 

MS 1047/1/1/2 Insert from notebook of lecture notes on Nursing from Preliminary Training School, Queen Elizabeth Hospital; Apr. 1944-Nov. 1945

 However, the most notable difference between her notes and those of today’s nursing students is that hers appear to have been checked over and marked in red pen by one of her instructors, in a manner which today would befit the work of a schoolchild. This perhaps explains her excessive neatness. Her teacher seems more concerned with her spelling than with her comprehension of the material, and on several occasions the notebook even features spelling exercises she has apparently been set after making an error! It seems on the surface that Dinah was a highly conscientious student who strove to achieve perfection. However, we can tell from her additional notes, which were found folded inside her notebook, that she also had a more relaxed, whimsical side: it seems that where her work was able to escape the beady eye of her tutor, she preferred to embellish it with intricate- and not strictly relevant– doodles.  

If you are interested in coming to see any items from Dinah’s archives for yourself – or indeed any items from our other collections – please email us at  mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk and we would be happy to book you in. 

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