Dame Agnes Hunt: pioneer of orthopaedic nursing.

As a young surgeon in the early 1950s, I trained in various orthopaedic units. Much of the work was concerned with children and young adults suffering from two devastating diseases: tuberculosis and poliomyelitis. These were to vanish almost entirely from our hospitals soon afterwards, thanks to Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), antibiotics and the polio vaccines. However, the dedicated nursing that long term orthopaedic patients of today still require--those with congenital deformities, spinal injuries, multiple traumas and so on--owes much to the teaching of Agnes Hunt, pioneer of orthopaedic care.