Emily de Burgh Daly

Emily Lucy de Burgh Daly (1859 to 1935), born Emily Lucy French, was an Irish nurse, writer and traveller. Born at Clooneyquin in County Roscommon, the sister of the songwriter Percy French, she left home in 1888 to train as a nurse at the Mildmay Hospital in Bethnal Green, London, and then travelled to Ningbo in China, where she nursed and took charge of a hospital for women. She gave up nursing when she married the Ningbo port doctor Charles de Burgh-Daly in 1890, but over roughly 25 years in China she travelled widely, sheltered refugees from the Sino-Japanese war at Niuzhuang in Manchuria and returned with her husband in 1910 to help during the pneumonic plague epidemic. The family settled in Dublin in 1912. In 1915 she published her memoir An Irishwoman in China, and she later edited two collections of her brother's work. This entry records her nursing career and is not medical advice.