The personification of Victorian care and founder of modern nursing could promenade on the North Otago town’s streets at this year’s medically themed Victorian Heritage Celebrations.
This year’s judge of the celebrations’ Costume Awards today, Elizabeth Perkinson, said she expected many in town would take the 2016 theme — "A year to reflect on the intriguing world of Medicine in the Victorian Era" — as an opportunity to create nurse, or doctor, costumes.
"Last year was frivolous, last year was fun, this year [organisers] have taken on a more serious note," Mrs Perkinson said.
While last year’s theme celebrated the sesquicentennial of Alice in Wonderland, allowing for cartoonish frivolity, this year’s theme would likely honour events such as the world’s first hospital-based ambulance service, based out of Commercial Hospital, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865, or the 1887 beginnings of the St John Ambulance Brigade at public events in London. Or, possibly, the pioneering nurse who brought sanitation to the war hospitals where the doctors of the day "were too busy chopping legs off to worry about how clean they were".
Mrs Perkinson will begin her judging remaining "incognito" during the morning promenade and after today’s Great Photo Opportunity on the steps of the Oamaru Opera House, she will acknowledge the winners of this year’s costume awards.
Mrs Perkinson moved from Rotorua to Oamaru in 2001 and has attended the celebrations annually since.
And though her costume in her first year was relatively ‘‘simple’’, she has made proper costumes ever since.
She said she knows the effort that goes into the creation of the costumes that participants simply "can’t buy".
It would take over a week to make just the foundational women’s undergarment, the corset, she said.
"If it’s to do with medicine then it’s in the ball game," Mrs Perkinson said.
But once a costume had passed the first test, it would be judged on the merits of the craft that created it.
"There is an art to actually making these costumes," Mrs Perkinson said.
