History of nursing in the United Kingdom matrons, whose work was largely administrative, even more so. Nursing in the Poor Law infirmaries, such as it was, was largely carried out by able-bodied paupers, who were not paid. In 1866 there were a total of 53 nurses employed in the 11 metropolitan workhouses, at an average salary of £20 18s. Florence Nightingale is regarded as the founder of modern nursing profession. There was no hospital training school for nurses until one was established in Kaiserwerth, Germany, in 1846. There, Nightingale received the training that enabled her in 1860 to establish, at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first
Florence Nightingale "Eminent Victorians". Strachey regarded Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who was both personally intolerable and admirable in her achievements. Cecil Woodham-Smith, like Strachey, relied heavily on Cook's "Life" in her 1950 biography, though she did have access to new family material preserved at Claydon. In 2008, Mark Bostridge published a major new life of Nightingale, almost exclusively based on unpublished material from the Verney Collections at Claydon and from archival documents from about 200 archives around the world, some of which had been published by Lynn McDonald in her projected sixteen-volume edition of the "Collected Works of Florence Nightingale"