Rachel Hanna (b. 1866)

Rachel Hanna graduated from the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing. During the Klondike gold rush, Robert Dickey was a presbyterian minister from Skagway, Alaska. He had appealed to Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of Canada’s Governor General at the time, and she helped to develop the Victorian Order of Nurses in Canada and sent trained nurses to the Klondike.¹⁾ She recruited women who were at least twenty-eight years old and graduates of recognised nursing schools.²⁾ The nurses agreed to work for $300 a year, plus expenses for board and travel.³⁾

Nurses Rachel Hanna, Georgia Powell, Margaret Payson, and Amy Scott left for the Yukon in April 1898 with 200 Yukon Field Force troops on their way to police the gold rush. Hanna was appalled by the state of health care in Dawson in September 1898 where typhoid was rampant, and scurvy was gaining patients. Rachel resigned at the end of 1899 because she wanted to stay in the north and feared she would be transferred elsewhere. She worked at the Good Samaritan Hospital as an employee of the Presbyterian Mission Board. When the hospital became a civic institution in 1904, Rachel moved to Atlin where she worked for another Presbyterian hospital for the next fourteen years.⁴⁾

In 1914, forty-eight year-old Rachel Hanna accompanied the 1st Canadian Contingent to France during the First World War.⁵⁾