Finding Courage to Lead in 2025: Lessons from Agnes Hunt

As we enter 2025, leadership is key in facing challenges in orthopaedic healthcare delivery, reimbursement, access to specialty care, shift in care settings, and the ongoing pinch of regulatory mandates. Leading generates the expectation of action and takes courage. Courage is a learned behavior through personal experiences of risk taking, gaining strength, confidence, and resilience through self-reflection and awareness on lessons learned through the process. Because leaders are also learners, leading requires time, energy, and a level of vulnerability as well. 

Within the specialty of orthopaedics, we have legacy leader, Agnes Hunt, whose shoulders we stand on. Over the course of 2025, we will explore the servant leadership traits of Agnes that demonstrate characteristics of empathy, persuasion, stewardship, awareness, listening, as well as commitment to the growth of others. This session will explore determination, empathy and power of sharing joy and how courage was key.
Agnes was born in 1866, the Victorian age, in Shropshire England. She was number six of eleven children in an upper middle-class family. Her parents disciplined the children in an authoritarian manner. As history records, Agnes’s mother, Marianne detested children and punishments were taken in silence. Agnes developed a sore on her heel, but because of her upbringing, she did not complain and suffered in silence until she became septic with high fever and delirium. The infection spread to her hip and subsequent dislocations.

In her memoirs, Agnes wrote, “My apprenticeship to crippledom had begun, and also the great education of pain.”  Marianne insisted that Agnes not be treated differently nor allow her to pity herself. This would prove as a testament to Agnes’s character and determination as she found adaptive ways to both play and work.
Agnes’ call to nursing came from a moment of spiritual enlightenment. One day, Agnes was weeping over her physical condition and circumstances. A clergyman entered her room as he heard Agnes’s cries and wrote in her birthday book, “Reared in suffering thou shalt know, how to solace others woe. The reward of pain doth lie, in the gift of sympathy.” Agnes began to reflect that she had been created for the purpose of helping other cripples and was determined to become a nurse.  She entered the Royal Alexandra Hospital school of nursing in 1887, Agnes, now 20, learned two founding principles in bettering the lives of crippled patients: 1) open air in healing and 2) happiness.  Agnes embracing these principles used her own personal experiences to bring hope and joy into the lives of her patients. By 1891, Agnes was a recipient of the Queens Badge and Brassard award. 

Agnes led with courage. She did not let the challenges she faced to an excuse to not move forward. She found purpose in her pain and embraced her calling. She became a learner. She was determined to make a difference and her efforts were recognized. 

Resources:
International Women's Day: Honouring the Shropshire woman who became the world’s first orthopaedic nurse | Shropshire Star
https://medicalmemories.wixsite.com/medicalmemories/dame-agnes-hunt