Louisa Mc Laughlin - Background and Training

Background and Training

Louisa’s family was typical of the upper ten thousand. Her father, the Very Rev. Hubert McLaughlin (1805–1882), and mother, the Honorable Frederica Crofton (1816–1881), each had a pedigree going back to King Edward I of England.

Hubert McLaughlin was Rector of Burford, Shropshire, a Rural Dean, and a Prebendary in Hereford Cathedral. He began his clerical career as domestic chaplain to Edward Crofton, 2nd Baron Crofton (1806–89), Representative Peer for Ireland and Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria.

In 1835, Hubert married Frederica, who was Lord Crofton's youngest sister. Louisa, their first child, was born in Nice, where her father had become the minister of the Church of England chapel. At that time Nice was a part of the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia.

Louisa was the eldest of three sisters, one of whom, Sophia, served as a nurse with the Universities' Mission to Central Africa for five years, until she took charge of wards at the Civil Hospital in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1893.

Louisa’s brothers included a major general, a judge, a Royal Navy captain, the agent to the Earl of Feversham, and two Church of England clergymen (Alfred, whose son was Christian thinker Father Patrick McLaughlin, and Randolph, who became a wealthy collector of antiquities). Two other brothers died in childhood.

Louisa was trained as a nurse by Sister Dora, whose care for industrial workers in Walsall was as great as Florence Nightingale's for military casualties in the Crimea. Louisa was Sister Dora's favorite pupil.

Louisa and Emma started working for the The National Health Society as soon as it was established in 1869. The Society, which undertook relief work for the London poor and gave lectures on health education, was founded by Europe’s first modern woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, an Englishwoman who had gained a degree in New York.