Winifred Hector Information

Winifred Emily Hector (21 December 1909 — 14 September 2002) was an English nurse and textbook author. She is credited with introducing modern curriculum and teaching methods to British nursing education.

Winifred Emily Hector was born at Taunton in Somerset, the daughter of Sidney Charles Hector and Beatrice Dugdale Hector. Her father worked on the Great Western Railway. She attended Bishop Foxs School in Taunton, and earned an intermediate bachelor of arts degree in English at Bedford College, London. Her near-sightedness made it difficult to manage the reading involved in further study of literature, so she turned her attention to nursing, as a student at St. Bartholomews Hospital. Much later in life, she earned a masters degree at City University London, with research on the life of Ethel Gordon Fenwick, a founder of the International Council of Nurses.

Hector was in charge of nurses preliminary training at the Manchester Royal Infirmary at the beginning of World War II. She ran a surgical ward at St. Bartholomews during the London Blitz, treating mainly acute injuries of bombing victims. She moved into teaching, taking the position of senior tutor at the wars end. She established "one of the first university courses for nurses," at City University, beginning in 1968.

Textbooks by Winifred Hector included Modern Gynaecology and Obstetrics For Nurses (1956, with John Howkins, revised 1963 and 1974 with Gordon Bourne),Modern Nursing: Theory and Practice (1960),A Textbook of Medicine for Nurses (1967, with Gordon Hamilton Fairley), and Nursing Care for the Dying Patient (1982). She also wrote an autobiography, Memoirs of a Somerset Woman (1997), and a book about nursing for lay readers, The Role of the Nurse (1977).

She retired from St. Bartholomews in 1970. For a decade after she retired, she was a lecturer at Queen Elizabeth College. In 1970, she was one of the founding members of the board of the Medical Recording Service, a body founded to support quality film and audio productions for medical education. In 1976, she was named a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. In 1978, she was script adviser on a series of ten films for nursing education.

Winifred Hector died in 2002, after several years of ill health, in London, aged 91 years.

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