Miss Mary Parkinson

PEOPLE WHO ARE A PART OF OUR STORY

A school nurse and certified midwife from Yorkshire (England), Miss Parkinson worked as a matron at the Nazareth Hospital for 24 years. She was a mother figure to the girls who were training at the School of Nursing.

Miss Mary Parkinson trained in Sheffield (UK) and was the matron of the Church of Scotland Jewish Mission Hospital in Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish War. After recovering from typhus and typhoid fever, she joined the Nazareth Hospital as a matron in 1924, working closely with Dr Bathgate. Miss Parkinson was also a member of the examination board for nurses.

One day, a girl showed up at her office, asking to join the nursing training programme. Her name was Gassia Shanlian, born in Armenia in the early 1900s. In order to train at the School of Nursing, students had to be at least 16 years old.

Having spent most of her childhood in an orphanage, Gassia did not have access to a birth certificate and lost contact with her family after they were forced to move to a Syrian refugee camp.

Miss Parkinson allowed her to enrol in the nursing programme. After graduating in 1928, Gassia trained as a midwife in Jerusalem, worked in Nablus and Haifa, and later moved to Edinburgh. But no distance could be an obstacle to the friendship they had created, so they kept in touch by letter.

Matron Parkinson and the School of Nursing gave many orphaned and displaced girls like Gassia a pathway to independence and self-respect through a career in nursing.

In 1945, Miss Parkinson retired and soon after went back to her hometown in Yorkshire. We learned from an article published at The Palestine Post of a retirement tea party held at the Nazareth Hospital in honour of Miss Parkinson. Amongst the guests, we could find many of her friends from Syria and the Mayor of Nazareth.

During the party, Miss Parkinson used the opportunity to appeal to the mothers in Palestine to support their daughters who wished to train as nurses. “She stressed the lack of volunteers for the nursing profession in this country and thanked all those who had assisted her in her years in Palestine.”

We can find the same passion Miss Parkinson had for educating nurses at the hospital in all her successors: Dr Nancy Martin, Dr Amal Khazin and our current Director of the Nazareth Academic School of Nursing, Dr Salam Hadid.