Catherine Jane Wood

Catherine Jane Wood was an English nurse, born in 1841, who worked with Charles West in the early years of the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and is regarded as a pioneer of paediatric nursing. She came to the hospital as a sister in the summer of 1863 under the superintendent Isabella Babb and was made a ward superintendent within a year. From about 1865 she and her colleague Jane Spencer Percival took part in founding a small hospital for children with chronic joint disease, which opened in Queen Square in 1867 with ten beds. In 1870 West appointed her Lady Superintendent of Cromwell House at Highgate Hill, and in 1878 she became Lady Superintendent of the main hospital. She resigned about ten years later to help her widowed sister-in-law. She also wrote on nursing, including A Handbook of Nursing for the Home and the Hospital, published in 1878. She died in 1930.