Ethel Maud De la Cour was to define Domestic Science teaching in Scotland. The Edinburgh School was a forerunner of Queen Margaret University. Stevenson took a particular interest in the standard of nursing at the poorhouse in her position as the first female poor law guardian in the city. She helped manage the Jubilee Nurses Institute (for District Nurses) and the Colonial Nursing Organisation (nurses needed in various parts of the British Empire), and was also president of the Society for the State Registration of Trained Nurses. Other interests While her sister Flora was one of the first women ever to serve on a school board, Louisa was one of the first women elected to a hospital board (and re-elected six times), and her work was so valuable that she changed the attitude of one male board member who had at first been opposed to the idea of a woman helping to run the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. She believed that women's qualifications for helping with hospital management were equal to men's though each sex might bring somewhat different experience to the task. And she was also one of the first (of two) women elected to the city's parochial board (later parish council) which she served upon for ten years. All her life, Louisa Stevenson supported the cause of women's suffrage and she was an executive committee member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in the 1890s. In the last years of her life, she met Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman as part of a deputation of women's suffragists, and in that same year, 1906, she received an honorary degree of LLD from the University of Edinburgh. She died on 13 May 1908, at home in Edinburgh. She is buried with her sisters in Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh. The grave lies on the southern wall above the south terrace. The British Journal of Nursing attributed her success in everything she did to her "genial courtesy", "indomitable perseverance" and a "thorough grasp of the subject in hand". References Sources Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Scotsman obituary, 14 May 1908 External links Edinburgh Cookery School 1835 births 1908 deaths People in health professions from Edinburgh Scottish suffragists Women of the Victorian era Founders of Scottish schools and colleges Alumni of the University of Edinburgh