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Clockwise from left: Pamela Wood’s research suggests Kate Wyllie, who trained at Gisborne Hospital, in 1901, was the first Maori woman to register as a nurse, in 1902. Agnes Maud Snell died from scarlet fever and tuberculosis in 1908, before she finished her training at Wellington Hospital. Amelia Bagley during her training at Dunedin Hospital, from 1892 to 1895. Nurses often struggled with the starched collars and removed their cuffs while tending patients.

Nurses have long been lauded as self-sacrificing heroes. And so they are, nurse and historian Pamela Wood says. But it is not how nurses have viewed themselves, the author of the first cultural history of nursing in New Zealand tells Bruce Munro.