Englishwoman Founds Hospital In Colombia

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29128, 13 February 1960, Page 10

Englishwoman Founds Hospital In Colombia

[By

WALDEMAR BELLON.

Reuter Correspondent]

BOGOTA, Colombia. Miss Frances Hancox, an Englishwoman who became a nurse through force of circumstances and founded a poor people’s clinic in this South American capital, is at present busy with an ambitious plan for a five-floor. 50-bed hospital. “I did not really mean to go into nursing at all,” Miss Hancox, who became a Member vf the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year honours list, explains. Born in a little town near Birmingham, she was strongly attracted towards missionary work. She received her theological training at Birkenhead, and later studied nursing at Birmingham, “just because I felt it was good to know this, too.” Miss Hancox joined the Worldwide Evangelical Crusade, an inter - denominational mission, which had started work in Colombia in 1933. She was sent to Bogota in July, 1938, and learned Spanish, the language of the country. Then she was moved to different mission posts. When her colleagues discovered she was a trained nurse, she was sent to stations far and near to attend the sick, and women in childbirth. Now, after 14 years. Miss Hancox still feels that she does not really belong to the profession in which she has worked so successfully. She runs a small clinic for the poor and needy which she opened in one of the poorest suburbs of Colombia’s capital. Most of the work done here is for maternity cases. The clinic has equipment only for minor surgical operations. There are only five beds. But a great deal of work is done among the poor people of the city. Since 1958, another gaduated nurse has been working with Miss Hancox. Some time last year, a man of about 50 was brought to the clinic with ghastly wounds. He had been attacked by religious fanatics. A big slash with a machete, a kind of bush knife, had cut through his forehead to the brain. Another slash, 30 inches long, had cut deep into his back. He had minor wounds on both forearms. He had been carried from a distant hamlet over long mule paths and finally over a paved highway. Miss Hancox called her trusted Colombian doctor and together, in about two hours, they stitched the man’s wounds. But. the missionary-turned-nurset’' does not intend to let her

work stop where it is now. The ambitious plan for a four-floor or five-floor clinic with 40 to 50 beds, an operating theatre and other modern facilities is already under way. A Colombian sponsor has given money to buy land for the new clinic. A Colombian architect is providing plans for the building. The hospital will be erected in the same poor suburb where she started her first clinic in 1946. In this district of Bogota the only first-aid post is at the police officers’ school. Miss Hancox has gone a long way since she decided in Birmingham 30 years ago to become a missionary and then became a nurse and founded a hospital. Life has been hard for her and sometimes dangerous—particularly during the Bogota revolution in 1948. when she helped with thousands of wounded.