Sarah Elizabeth Wardroper appointment as matron at St Thomas' Hospital in January 1854. Although nursing was still largely a disreputable occupation she made St Thomas' a model of reformed, professional, nursing and in 1860, with the creation of the training school for nurses by the Nightingale Fund at the same hospital, she was appointed superintendent. Florence Nightingale selected St Thomas' Hospital as the site for her new nurse training school, largely because of Wardroper's qualities (and those of the enlightened resident medical officer, R.G. Whitfield). Nightingale, Wardroper and Whitfield worked together to establish the new school, the first secular training school for nurses
History of nursing rapidly in the late 19th century as larger hospitals set up nursing schools that attracted ambitious women from middle- and working-class backgrounds. Agnes Elizabeth Jones and Linda Richards established quality nursing schools in the U.S. and Japan; Linda Richards was officially America's first professionally trained nurse, having been trained at Florence Nightingale's training school, and subsequently graduating in 1873 from the "New England Hospital for Women and Children" in Boston In the early 1900s, the autonomous, nursing-controlled, Nightingale-era schools came to an end. Despite the establishment of university-affiliated nursing schools, such as Columbia and Yale, hospital training programs were dominant.