Dorothy Pattison, who was afterwards known as Sister Dora, was born in 1832 in a little village called Hauxwell, near Richmond, in Yorkshire, of which her father was the rector. She was the youngest but one of a family of twelve children, of whom ten were daughters. They grew up in all the enjoyment of country life. Dorothy was delicate as a child and not allowed to do regular lessons, but she describes herself as having all the same been a great romp, as wild and merry as a boy, and good at all outdoor sports—riding, rowing, shooting, swimming, and skating. But even as a tiny child she loved to wash and nurse her dolls, and longed to be able to do the same for real people. When she talked over the future with her nearest sister she used to say, “I’ll be a nurse or a lady doctor and do everything for my patients.” When she was twelve, one of her sisters fell ill, and Dorothy begged, at first in vain, to be allowed to sit up with her and nurse her, but at last she managed to slip into the room unnoticed, and once she was there, she was allowed to stay and helped to nurse her sister till she was well. A couple of years afterwards a fever broke out in the village, and an old woman whom Dorothy knew very well took it. She called at the house to ask how she was and found the old woman left quite alone. In a moment, she made up her mind, and without thinking of what her parents might say, she hung up her coat and jacket behind the door and told the old woman she had come to stay with her. In the evening she sent a message home to say that she was going to stay all night, and word came back that, as she had chosen to stay without permission, she must now remain with the old woman. She washed her and nursed her and read the Bible to her, but she grew worse and worse, and the next night she died. A kind neighbour came in and helped to lay her out, but Dorothy, tired out and frightened, was left to spend the night alone in the cottage. Next morning she sent a message to the Rectory to say that the poor woman had died, might she come home. But the answer came back, “Stay where you are till you are sent for.” She was terrified lest her parents had cast her off and she should never be allowed to go home. But soon a carriage arrived with her old nurse to carry her off to spend a month at the seaside, so that she might be free from all infection before going home. When at last she returned home she was welcomed as a little heroine, and got rather puffed up by the praise she received.

As she got stronger and able to study more, she was inclined to rebel at the time spent over lessons, and said she did not see why, as she was going to be a nurse, she should learn languages and music. But she was told that a nice Christian nurse should learn everything she had time for; she might some day have French or German patients, and music would be a pleasure to everybody; it would not do to be one-sided, for she ought to be able to care for the minds and souls of her patients as well as for their bodies. So she was persuaded to study gladly, and would often wonder how the thing she was learning would come in afterwards. Later she found that there was not a single thing she had learnt which had not in some way been hallowed in the service of God. She used to say to others, “Never feel that it is waste of time to get knowledge of any kind; you can never tell how handy it may come in.”

Dora grew up to be a very handsome woman. By the time she was twenty, all her delicacy had disappeared and she was tall and strong. She had very high spirits and was always full of fun and ready to see the funny side of people and things. Her laughter and her happy voice, singing as she went about the house, were the delight of her father, who called her his sunshine. But though she loved her home and her rides and walks on the moors, she did not find there enough occupation for her active nature. Her mother died after a long time of ill-health, during which Dora had been one of her devoted nurses, and now Dora longed for some real work. Her father did not wish her to leave home, but he did not forbid it, and at last when she was twenty-nine, Dora went to be schoolmistress at Woolston, a little village in Buckinghamshire. She lived there alone in a tiny cottage, loving the children who came to her school, and making herself the friend of all the poor and sick in the village. She did not feel, however, that this was her real work; and after three years she decided to join the Sisterhood of the Good Samaritans. She had learnt to know these Sisters in Yorkshire, as they had their chief home at Coatham, which was not very far from her old home. The Sisters had a Convalescent Home under their care, and many of them went out from Coatham to work in other towns.

After she joined the Sisterhood, Sister Dora, as she was now called, had to work very hard. The Sisters did all the work of the house, and Sister Dora cleaned floors and grates, swept and dusted, and for a time acted as cook. She sometimes felt it very hard to have to do all this work. Once when a gentleman whom she knew came into the kitchen where she was peeling potatoes, she pulled her hood over her face so that he might not see her. In after life she found the great advantage of having learnt how to do all the work of a house herself. She thought some of the rules very strict; but still she was very happy there, and the Sisters loved her. She was able also to learn more about nursing, as the Sisters had a Cottage Hospital near Middlesborough, to which she was sent. Sometimes, too, she was sent to nurse private patients, and sometimes to nurse in another Cottage Hospital for accidents at Walsall, which was managed by the Coatham Sisters.

At last Sister Dora settled altogether at Walsall, in charge of the little hospital there. Walsall is a great manufacturing centre, with coal pits, blast furnaces, and many kinds of factories. It had then no large hospital; the little Cottage Hospital was chiefly intended for accidents, and the patients were for the most part men and boys from the pits and workshops. There were also a large number of out-patients, men, women, and children. As most of the cases were accidents, Sister Dora was particularly anxious to become a good surgical nurse, and the chief surgeon at the hospital, when he saw how quick and clever she was, taught her all that he could, so that she could attend to many cases herself without the help of the doctor. The hospital in which she at first nursed was very small and inconvenient, with only fourteen beds, but a few years after Sister Dora settled in Walsall a new hospital was built on the top of the hill on which the town lies. It had twenty-eight beds, conveniently arranged in three wards, so that it was just possible for an active woman like Sister Dora to do all the nursing herself. She had the help of an old servant of her family, who came to live with her and who soon learnt to be a very capable nurse herself. Other women were engaged to sit up at night with the patients, and, later, Sister Dora used to have lady pupils who learnt nursing under her.

It was a very hard life, full of ceaseless work and responsibility, but Sister Dora threw her whole heart into it, and loved her work and the people for whom she worked. Once settled at Walsall, she never wished to leave it. Speaking to a friend about her work, she said, “I generally find that the more I have to do the stronger and happier I feel. It is hard enough sometimes at night, when I have been round to all the patients and left them comfortable and asleep, and am just going to bed myself, to be called down by the bell, or perhaps roused by it just as I am falling asleep. But then I think ‘the Master calleth thee,’ and jump up and go down, to find perhaps some poor drunken man or woman, and it is difficult to recognise the Master in such poor degraded creatures as come to be doctored up.” She had a wonderful power over the men and boys amongst whom she worked. She sympathised deeply with all their pain and trouble, and made them feel as if their troubles were her own, but she tried to make them forget their pain by her bright talk and her laughter and jokes. She would raise their spirits by her delightful fun, till an Irishman said once, “Make you laugh! she’d make you laugh when you were dying.” Whenever she had a spare minute, she would read to them or talk to them or play games with them. She allowed no bad talk or quarrelling in the wards, and tried to mend her patients’ morals as well as their limbs. They each of them knew that they had a real friend in her, and that she prayed for each and cared deeply what became of them. They loved to come and see her after they had left the hospital, and were always sure of a welcome. She tried hard to cure them from their drinking ways, showing them again and again how hard it was to heal the wounds of those who drank; and when they were brought in at night wounded after a drunken brawl, after dressing their wounds with all her usual gentleness, she would ask them why they did not behave like respectable members of society, instead of fighting in the streets and getting her up at unearthly hours of the night to mend their broken heads.

Sister Dora was devoted to children and they loved her, and she knew how to get them to bear patiently the dressing of their wounds. Often when a child was miserable and in pain, she would carry it about with her on one arm as she went through the wards, saying, “Don’t you cry, Sister’s got you,” whilst with her other hand she attended to the patients. Many children suffering from terrible burns used to be brought to the hospital, and she grew so clever in treating them that the surgeons trusted them entirely to her care. Once a child was brought in so badly burnt that it was plain it had only a few hours to live. All pain had ceased, but the child was terrified. Sister Dora gave up all other work in order to comfort her. She sat by the bed for some hours talking to her about Jesus Christ and His love for little children, and about heaven where she would never feel hunger and pain again. The child grew peaceful and happy, and her last words were, “When you come to heaven, Sister, I’ll meet you at the gates with a bunch of flowers.”

Sister Dora felt special sympathy for the men who had been so hurt that it seemed necessary for them to have an arm or leg cut off. She knew well how difficult this made it for them to earn a livelihood, and she devoted all her skill to saving the wounded limb if possible. One night a fine healthy young man was brought in with his arm torn and twisted by a machine. The doctor said that nothing could save it, and that he must cut it off at once. Sister Dora was moved by the despair of the poor man; she looked long at his arm and at himself, and the man cried out, “O Sister! save my arm for me; it’s my right arm.” When she turned to the doctor and asked if she might try to save the arm, he only asked her if she was mad, and said that the man’s life could not be saved unless his arm were taken off at once. But she turned to the patient and said, “Are you willing for me to try to save your arm, my man?” He was willing, but the surgeon was very angry, and refused to help her, saying, “Remember, it’s your arm,” and telling her she must take all the responsibility. Night and day for three weeks she tended him, naturally feeling terribly anxious as to what would happen. She often said afterwards, “How I prayed over that arm.” At the end of that time she asked the surgeon to come and look at her work, and when she unbandaged the arm and showed it to him, straightened and in a healthy, promising condition, he exclaimed, “Why you have saved it, and it will be a useful arm to him for many a long year.” It is not surprising that Sister Dora wept with joy at her success, nor that the man became one of her most devoted admirers. He was nicknamed “Sister’s Arm” in the hospital, and used to come back often to see her after he had left.

Another man himself tells how she had to persuade him to allow his leg to be taken off as the only way of saving his life. He had grown so thin and wasted that she used to carry him upstairs in her arms so that he might join in the prayers she held for the whole hospital. He was eight months in the hospital, and he says, “I learned to love Sister Dora as a mother.” He tells how she used in the afternoons to attend to the out-patients, “dress their wounds, set a broken arm, sew up a cut, or draw teeth, in fact anything that was required of her she would do, and always with the tenderest care and the kindest word to all.” She often amused the men with tales of her doings in the country as a girl, and told them about her riding and fox-hunting, and this man who watched her life in the hospital for eight months says, “those patients who were the most trouble, she seemed the fondest of.” She knew how to get the men to help her by making them wait upon one another; generally there was some boy who had to stay a long while in the hospital, who waited upon her as a devoted slave. After she had been four years at the hospital, to show their gratitude for all she had done, her patients subscribed fifty pounds amongst themselves with which they bought a small carriage and pony for her. She delighted in using it to send convalescents for a drive, and found it a help in taking her to visit sick people in their homes. She seldom took a holiday herself, and once was three years at the hospital without any break, but if she did go away into the country with friends, she enjoyed everything with all her old energy, bathing or skating, taking long walks, when she would lead the way in scaling fences or fording streams. Sometimes she took patients who were convalescent for expeditions into the country or to visit Lichfield Cathedral. The old patients specially loved to revisit the hospital on Sundays, when, after a clergyman had held a short service, Sister Dora used to speak to them herself, and then lead them in the singing of many hymns. She always had a small Bible in her pocket, and studied it whenever she had a spare minute.

In 1875 there was a terrible outbreak of smallpox in Walsall. There was an isolation hospital on the outskirts of the town, but in those days people were not compelled by law to send smallpox patients away, and they refused to go of their own accord, for they said that they would rather die at home. It was very necessary for the welfare of the town that they should be persuaded to go to the hospital and not spread the terrible infection by staying in their own homes. So Sister Dora offered to leave her hospital and go to take charge of the Smallpox Hospital. She knew that the people trusted her, and thought that they would come if she was there. Her offer was gladly accepted; all through the town the news ran, “Sister is going to the Epidemic Hospital.” Her lady pupils were left to take charge of the hospital, and she went off to her lonely work with the surgeon of the hospital to show her the way. It seemed such a lonely and desolate spot that even her courage failed her at the door, and she cried out, “Oh take me back, I cannot endure this dreadful place.” But the surgeon knew her real courage, and only said, “Come in.” It was an admirably planned little hospital, and she was delighted with it. There were twenty-eight beds, and she had not been half-an-hour in the hospital before seven patients arrived, to be followed by many more. Her only regular helper was the porter, an old man, who did all he could for her when he was sober, but used sometimes to go away and get drunk, leaving her alone for the whole night. Two old women came in from the workhouse to help her in washing the clothes and bedding, but much of the scrubbing and cleaning she had to do herself, as well as all the nursing. One of the police who came to see her told her that the people in the town declared they should not mind having the smallpox with “Sister” to nurse them. Some few people were brave enough to visit her in her loneliness, and to bring her books and flowers and news of her patients at the hospital.

One of the old patients, an engine-stoker, went often to see her after his day’s work was done. He had been twice in the hospital under her care, and he said, “I could not tell you all her goodness to me, words would fail me if I tried.” She was full of courage and joy in her work, and wrote to a friend: “You must not fret. I rejoice that He has permitted one so unworthy to work for Him; and oh, if He should think me fit to lay down my life for Him, rejoice, rejoice, at so great a privilege.” Even her sense of fun did not leave her, and she wrote a long letter to her old patients at the Cottage Hospital, calling them all by their nicknames and sending messages to each. She said of a boy who was her special slave: “What shall I say to my beloved Sam. I wish I had my boy here. I send him twenty kisses and hope he has been in church to-day and in time. He must not sulk all the time I am away. I have two blessed babies, who alternately keep up music all day and night, accompanied by an Irishwoman’s tongue, so I am not dull. Have you been singing to-day? You must sing particularly, ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’ and think of me. Living or dying, I am His. Oh, my children, you all love me for the very little I do for you; but oh, if you would only think what Jesus has done, and is doing for you, your hearts would soon be full of love for Him, and you would all choose Him for your Master.”

Towards the middle of May, the Smallpox Hospital was empty and she hoped soon to leave; but before she was ready to go new patients were brought in, and this happened several times, so that it was not till the middle of August, after six months’ work at the Smallpox Hospital, that she was able to close it.

The following October a terrible explosion occurred at the furnace of some ironworks, and eleven men were covered with streams of molten metal. In their agony they jumped into a neighbouring canal, and were with difficulty rescued and taken in cabs to the hospital. Burnt all over and frightfully disfigured, they were carried in and laid on the floor till a ward could be cleared for them. It was a terrible scene, even the doctors could hardly stay in the ward, but Sister Dora never ceased in her devoted care of the men. Cries came from most of them, “Sister, come and dress me.” “Do dress me,” “Oh, you don’t know how bad I am.” She could only answer, “Oh my poor men, I’ll dress you all, if you’ll give me time.” One poor man, seeing how distracted she was by the different cries for help, said, “Sister Dora, I want to be dressed very bad, but if there’s any wants you worse go and do them first.” He was in terrible pain and died during the night. Of the eleven only two recovered. Some lingered for as long as ten days, and during that time Sister Dora never went to bed, and hardly left the ward. One of those who survived described how she went from bed to bed talking, laughing, even joking with the men; telling them stories, doing everything she could to distract them from their pain, and pointing out the way to heaven to those who were to die. He spoke with delight of her visits to his bedside at night when he was recovering, saying, “It did you good only to look at her,” and ending with, “What we felt for her I couldn’t tell you; my tongue won’t say it.”

One result of this terrible accident was that the ward in which the burnt men had lain was so poisoned that it could not be used again, and it was decided to build a new hospital. In the meanwhile, a house was fitted up as a temporary hospital. It was a tiring life for Sister Dora, as the temporary hospital was small and not at all convenient, and many patients had to be nursed in their own homes. It was at this time that she first began to find it difficult to lift her patients, and after a while she was compelled to consult a doctor about her health. He discovered that she had a mortal malady. It was possible that an operation might do her some good, but it was by no means certain. She determined to go on as usual, and made him promise to tell no one of her illness. She worked harder than ever and would not give in. She drove about in her little pony carriage to visit her patients, and no one was allowed to know that anything was wrong with her. Then an outbreak of fever in the temporary hospital made it necessary to close it, and as the new hospital was not yet ready it was possible for Sister Dora to leave Walsall. She visited her relations and went to Paris and London to study improvements in surgical science. All the time her disease was growing worse, and still she told no one. Her wish was to die at Walsall amongst her own people, and as the hospital was not ready, a little house near to it was taken for her. People could not believe that she was dying. She was surrounded with all the care that love could give her, and often her visitors were surprised to see her, in spite of pain and weakness, still her old self, full of fun and jokes. Her interest in the new hospital was very keen, and she rejoiced that it was finished in time for her to know of its opening. She listened eagerly to all that was told her about it, and gave her advice about all the arrangements. Often she suffered terribly, and when at last she died, on Christmas eve, 1878, it was with relief that her friends heard that her pain was over. She was carried to her grave by some of the railway men for whom she had cared with so much devotion. The Bishop was there and great numbers of the clergy, and there came, too, hundreds of her patients and an immense crowd consisting of nearly all the people of the town.

When, later, it was discussed what memorial of her should be placed in Walsall some suggested a Convalescent Home, as what she herself would most have desired; but the working men of the town were quite clear that what they wanted was a statue of Sister Dora. One of them said that of course they could not forget her, but that they wanted her to be there, so that when strangers came and saw the statue and asked who it was, they might answer, “Who’s that? Why that’s our Sister Dora.” So her statue in her nurse’s dress, as she lived and worked amongst them, stands in the centre of Walsall to remind the people of her life of love. The workmen spoke of her as “the most saintly thing that was ever given us.”