Issue 37 Aurora Magazine April 2021

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NURSE FRANCES FURNIFULL
Disease Casualties Outnumber Battle Deaths by 37-1
STORY ANNE SKINNER
Military nursing is not all about binding wounds and comforting shell-shocked soldiers.
War and disease have always gone hand in hand, often the result of overcrowded
conditions, poor quality water, high stress levels and low resistance to infection in
unfamiliar territory. The Middle Eastern campaign of the First World War, in which
the Allies successfully pushed the Turks back from the Suez Canal to Damascus, was a
theatre of rampant disease. Albany-born Staff Nurse Frances Furnifull was to find that
far more of her patients suffered from cholera, malaria, influenza, venereal disease and
tuberculosis than battle wounds. In the 315,000-strong Egyptian Expeditionary Force,
disease casualties outnumbered bullet and shrapnel wounds by more than 37 to 1.
During the last three months of the Palestine campaign alone, a total of 773 deaths
from malaria infection were recorded. Another 934 soldiers from all ranks died
of pneumonic influenza – also known as Spanish Flu – during the same period.
In comparison, combat casualties for the entire Desert Mounted Corps of about
40,000 men during the same time space were 198 dead or missing and 438 wounded.
Large sections of the military hospitals in Egypt were given over to the treatment of
disease, including No. 14 Australian General Hospital which was set up to focus largely
on infectious disorders.
Frances Grace Furnifull was one of four daughters of Annie and Benjamin Furnifull,
who at one time lived in Albany before moving to Sydney. All their daughters entered
the nursing profession, although only Frances and her elder sister Sarah (featured
in last month’s edition of Aurora) served in military hospitals during the First World
War. Frances was a Staff Nurse at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney when she
enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on 10 May 1917. Her colleagues held
a farewell for her and another sister, at which the Daily Telegraph reported she was
presented with “…a wristlet watch and two travel cushions. Sister Furnifull also received
a fountain pen and a collapsible cup from the patients in her ward”. The 26-yearold
nurse embarked on the troopship Mooltan two months later. On arrival in Egypt
she was assigned to No. 14 Australian General Hospital, which occupied the former
Egyptian Army barracks in Abbassia, a suburb of Cairo.
By the time Nurse Furnifull disembarked at Alexandria in June, the Palestine campaign
had reached a stalemate. The Allies had fought the Ottoman forces through Sinai and
Gaza and both sides now held their more or less stationary opposing lines of defence
from Gaza to Beersheba. The now-famous charge at Beersheba and the Great Ride north
through the Jordan Valley to Damascus were still in the future. The hot Middle Eastern
summer, with its swarms of flies, poor quality water and bad sanitation, reaped a heavy
toll as soldiers fell ill from a range of diseases including cholera, typhoid, dysentery,
diphtheria, pneumonia and meningitis. The vast number of diseased troops had to be
sent back to military hospitals in Egypt for treatment. No. 14 AGH, set up the previous
year, now had an annex on the Suez Canal in Port Said where patients were sent by train
from Cairo. Frances was sent to Port Said sometime in late 1917 or early 1918.
As the current Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, frontline medical staff members
are particularly vulnerable to infection. Frances managed to avoid falling ill for almost a
LEFT: Staff Nurse Frances Furnifull (left) pictured with her elder sister Sarah before they both
enlisted to serve in the First World War. (Courtesy Australian Women’s Weekly, National Library
of Australia) BELOW: Australian Army Nursing Service sisters about to embark on the Mooltan in
June 1917. Staff Nurse Frances Furnifull is pictured near the middle of the sixth row from the front.
(Courtesy Australian War Memorial A01240)
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