Charlotte Norrie

Charlotte Norrie, born Helga Charlotte Harbou in Altona in 1855, was a Danish nurse, educator and campaigner for women's rights. She trained as a nursing apprentice at Copenhagen's General Hospital and Queen Louise's Children's Hospital, then ran courses in basic nursing and first aid with her husband, the eye doctor Gordon Norrie, training more than five hundred women. She argued publicly against the poor standard of hospital nurse training and proposed a private nursing school as early as 1888, years before Denmark's first state training facility opened in 1910. She was a co-founder of the International Council of Nurses in London in 1899, helped found the Danish Council of Women, served as its president until 1909, and led the Danish Women's Defence Association. In her last working years she founded the Ejra School for nursing and first aid. She died in Copenhagen in 1940.