A Nurse's Story

 “A symphony of pain” – click on the link to hear this 1984 Radio New Zealand programme, in which New Zealand nurse Isobel McGuire (née Dodds) describes how she and two fellow nurses served in Spanish hospitals during 1937-38. Two other New Zealand nurses also volunteered with Spanish Republican medical services.  

A public-spirited Christchurch nurse, Dorothy Morris, joined the British Universities Ambulance Unit in February 1937. She worked first with refugees at Almeria, then joined the mainly-East European 13th International Brigade as head nurse and worked in mountain villages west of Madrid. For two years she headed a children’s hospital in the southern city of Murcia, until ordered to leave Spain ahead of the advancing Nationalist forces. She then relocated to southern France to work with Spanish refugees, both military and civilian. Dorothy Morris remained proud of her Spanish Civil War service throughout her long life.  

Una Wilson, an operating theatre nurse, arrived in Madrid in late 1936 with several Australian colleagues. She served in frontline field hospitals during the horrifically bloody battle of Jarama, telling her friends, “We seem to wade about in a river of blood without a break... I feel tonight I could never smile again.” Yet she continued her frontline service for two years, until all International Brigaders were ordered to leave Spain. 

New Zealand’s Spanish Medical Aid Committee funded three nurses – René Shadbolt, Irene Dodds and Millicent Sharples – to go to Spain together. On the day they left Auckland in May 1937, the police detained them for three hours, interrogating them about their political views and reasons for travelling to Spain. The women stood firm, and finally left on schedule. They were sent to Huete, the province of Cuenca, where they worked in an International Brigade hospital set up in a 12th-century monastery. In winter their work often included amputating their patients’ frostbitten fingers and toes. By 1938, when the front line moved close to Huete, nurses Shadbolt and Dodds worked for up to 48 hours nonstop to manage the vast number of casualties arriving from the battlefield. ‘If you’ve got a job of work to do,’ said Dodds later, ‘you don’t necessarily think too much about whether you’re scared or not.’ In late 1938 René Shadbolt married a German International Brigader, Willi Remmel, whom she first met as a patient in her hospital. Soon afterwards they were both forced to return to their own countries, and never saw each other again.