Nurse Nina May Palmer

Nina May (May) Palmer was an adventurer to the core. She nursed on three continents, attended the wounded of two wars and was the first woman in the world to cross the first bridge built over the Blue Nile.

Nurse Nina May Palmer	Medal of the Order of the British Empire (Civil)	QAIMNSR Badge

She was on holiday with her mother in Greece in 1913 when the second instalment in the bloody Balkans War broke out. May was asked by the Queen of Greece to nurse in a 900-patient military hospital that was so crowded that casualties filled the corridors and every other available space that could be found for them.

May worked extremely hard, dividing her time between the military hospital and an equally stretched general hospital.  “There were many shockingly badly shattered limbs and some sad abdominal cases where the intestines and bladder had been riddled with bullets,” she wrote. “One longed to be able to give the sufferers more actual nursing.”

The experience would reduce May to a physical wreck, forcing her to leave Athens on a stretcher and later return home to Wellington.
However, the experience didn’t dampen her spirit entirely and at the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, she was the first New Zealand nurse to depart for France and the French Red Cross.

Based at a military hospital in Menton, located some distance from the frontline, May treated the less seriously wounded, among which amputations and festering wounds were common enough. In the New Zealand nursing journal Kai Tiaki, May writes about the excitement of being in foreign fields and her great admiration for the soldiers.

In the middle of 1915, when nurses were in great demand in London, May transferred from the French Red Cross to the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Reserve. She spent time on the hospital ship HMS Asturias, before it was torpedoed and sunk in 1917.

After the war, May was matron of a hospital built to care for the 20,000 men who were employed to build the Assissan Dam in the Sudan.
When the World War II started, May, who was living in Jersey, was evacuated to England and some years later returned to Wellington where in 1951 she became one of the first residents of Lady Freyberg Home.