Nursing professor Marga Thome dies at 84

Marga Ingeborg Thome, professor emerita at the University of Iceland’s Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, has died aged 84. She died on October 8 at the palliative care unit of Landspítali in Kópavogur, Morgunblaðið reports.

Thome was born in Oberlöstern, Wadern, Germany, on July 17, 1942. She had lived and worked in Iceland since 1973. In 1974, she married lawyer Erlingur Bertelsson. They had one daughter, Katrín, and three grandchildren.

She completed secondary school and nursing studies in Germany, followed by midwifery training in Switzerland in 1965. She qualified as a nursing teacher in Heidelberg in 1973, earned a master’s degree from the University of Manchester in 1977, and completed a doctorate through Queen Margaret College and the Open University in Edinburgh in 1996.

After working as a nurse and midwife in Germany, Switzerland and Iceland, Thome began teaching in the University of Iceland’s nursing programme in 1974. She became a lecturer in 1977, the programme’s first permanent teacher, and was promoted to associate professor in 1980. She became a professor in 2006 and retired in 2012.

Thome helped develop the university’s nursing and midwifery programmes through bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. She was the first chair of the University of Iceland’s Institute of Nursing Research from 1997 to 2000, and the first dean of its Faculty of Nursing from 2000 to 2003. From 2000 to 2007, she represented Iceland in the European Working Group of Nurses Researchers.

She was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Falcon in 2010 and made an honorary member of the Icelandic Nurses’ Association in 2019. Her funeral will be held at Christ the King Church in Landakot on October 19 at 1 p.m.