What is the name of the alcoholic nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit?

The alcoholic nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit is Sairey Gamp, also commonly called Mrs. Gamp.

Mrs. Gamp is a disreputable, careless nurse whose professional duties are undermined by her fondness for drink. She boasts about her nursing abilities, but Dickens presents her as sloppy, unreliable, and morally dubious. Her long speeches repeatedly invoke Mrs. Harris, an apparently imaginary friend whose opinions conveniently support Gamp's own behavior.

Dickens introduced Martin Chuzzlewit as a serial from 1843 to 1844, and Mrs. Gamp quickly became one of its most memorable comic characters. She was reportedly inspired by a real nurse described to Dickens by his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts. The character became a stereotype of incompetent, untrained Victorian nursing before reforms associated with Florence Nightingale.

Readers sometimes confuse Mrs. Gamp with Mrs. Harris, but Harris is not the nurse: she is the unseen figure Gamp constantly cites. Gamp's oversized umbrella also became so closely associated with her that a similar umbrella was nicknamed a “gamp.”