Sibella Annie Barrington

Sibella Annie Barrington was a Canadian nurse who worked in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the early twentieth century; sources disagree on the exact days of her birth and death in December 1867 and December 1929. Born into a family of British settlers in Cape Breton, she graduated from the Aberdeen Hospital School of Nursing in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in 1904 and became a registered nurse in 1922, when the province introduced registration. She studied further in Chicago and Dublin, where she learned of Lady Aberdeen's work against tuberculosis, and in London, where she worked with the New Zealand physician Frederic Truby King. Back in Nova Scotia she built a private practice, was superintendent of the Halifax Infants' Home from 1918 to 1923 and held office in nursing and child welfare bodies. After the First World War she organized home nursing classes for the Canadian Red Cross in Saint John, New Brunswick, where she died after surgery.