Australian Dictionary of Biography

Isla Stuart Blomfield (1865-1959), nurse, sanitary inspector and health visitor, was born on 9 July 1865 near Mudgee, New South Wales, eldest of eight children of native-born parents Henry Wilson Blomfield, grazier, and his wife Margaret, daughter of James Cox. Isla was raised in the Anglican faith. She was well educated and probably had a governess. After six months work at the Coast Hospital, Little Bay, she began nursing on 21 January 1896 at (Royal) Prince Alfred Hospital where Matron Susan McGahey noted that she was 'ever mindful of the patients' comfort'. On qualifying, Blomfield left in November 1899 for a 'long holiday'.

Having obtained an obstetrics certificate from Queen Charlotte's Lying-in Hospital, London, in 1901 she toured hospitals in the United States of America. Following further nursing at R.P.A.H., Blomfield spent three years in China and gained experience in treating infectious diseases. In 1909 she travelled by train across Siberia, visited Berlin and represented the Australasian Trained Nurses' Association at the International Council of Nurses' congress in London.

Back in Sydney, Blomfield qualified as a health inspector, with certificates from the Royal Sanitary Institute, London, and the East Sydney Technical College. Active for a decade on the A.T.N.A. council, she advocated the foundation of a college of nursing. Her frequent articles in the Australasian Nurses' Journal urged her colleagues to be more professional and assertive, provided advice on nursing cholera and dysentery patients, and promoted smallpox vaccination; they also expressed her demand for greater government intervention, as well as conveying her feminist and humanitarian ideals.

Nurse-in-charge (1910-11) of the Alice Rawson School for Mothers, in 1911 Blomfield was appointed nurse inspector by the Sydney Municipal Council's health committee. Under the supervision of W. G. Armstrong, she continued to 'educate' new mothers: as part of the campaign to reduce infant mortality, she visited over 1400 mothers a year until the government Baby Health centres took over in 1915. Continuing as sanitary inspector with special concern for women's health and tubercular patients, she maintained her neonatal interests. At the 1917 Infant and Child Welfare Conference she recommended subsidized milk as a means of improving maternal nourishment. From 1918 she was an executive-member of the Royal Society for the Welfare of Mothers and Babies, established by the Holman government to oversee infant welfare.

Blomfield actively promoted her public health interests through membership of the Playgrounds Association, the Health Society of New South Wales (later Health Association of Australia), the standing committee on public health of the National Council of Women, the Board of Social Study and Training, the Professional Women Workers' Association and the Women's Club. With her mother (d.1927), she lived at the Astor, Macquarie Street. She retired in 1930.

Dr Armstrong judged that Isla's 'tact, natural charm and sympathy' had overcome much of the hostility of mothers to official interference. She registered as a general nurse in 1930, visited Britain twice more and, at the age of 79, took up sculpture. Blomfield died, unmarried, on 16 August 1959 at her Potts Point flat and was cremated with Christian Science forms.