Gladys Beaumont Carter

Gladys Beaumont Carter (21 April 1887 – 8 December 1959) was a British academic nurse, economist and writer. Her research led to the first academic university department for nursing in Europe at the University of Edinburgh.

Life
Carter was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1887. Her parents were Edith Cecilia Carter (born Beaumont) and Thomas Edward Carter. She had a younger brother and a sister. She was educated in private schools in Britain and Belgium before she went to the North London Collegiate School. In 1918 she went to study social sciences in Bristol for a year. She made sociology her specialist subject when she studied economics at the London School of Economics from 1918 to 1922. She then studied midwifery and at the end of 1923 went to work for the City of Westminster Health Society. Carter was employed as a health visitor and as a midwife and in 1925 she decided to train to be a state registered nurse at London's King's College Hospital.

In 1930 she was teaching midwifery and starting to campaign for higher educational standards in nursing. She was unusual in being both a graduate and a nurse and she believed this combination was the future. She apologised in the Nursing Times for applying economics to nursing but said that this was necessary beyond "vocation" and "self sacrifice". Nurses were learning how to cope and not how to assist in a better medical service.

In 1934 she became the Organising Secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, then called the Midwife's Institute. She was the Education Officer and revised and published The Midwife’s Dictionary and Encyclopaedia in 1934 and again in 1939.

In 1938 she published A New Deal for Nurses. She wrote about the effect of rigid hierarchies and outdated discipline which encouraged bullying and created barriers to progress and the recruitment of nurses. She wrote about the ceremonies and forms created by matrons and ward sisters that created mental health issues for their subordinates.

Carter began work with the University of Edinburgh in 1953. She had been teaching at the University of Toronto but returned to do research funded by the Boots company. She was the first nurse to receive a research grant and her work was supported by the Scottish branch of the Royal College of Nursing and Edinburgh University. From 1952, she reviewed the existing course for tutors of nursing in Edinburgh and compared it with three alternative courses in England. In 1956 the university opened the first department of nursing in Europe for academic study. The new course was two years long and all of the students were required to meet the entrance requirement of the university. This course and department was inspired by Carter's work, a university working party and a 1955 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Death and legacy
Carter became ill in 1956. Elsie Stephenson who did not have a nursing background became the new director of the "Nursing Unit" at the university. Carter joined the university of Edinburgh's Medical faculty. Carter had published A Dictionary of Midwifery and Public Health in 1954 and after she died in hospital in London in 1959 there was a second edition.