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
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 In 2008, Mark Bostridge published a major new life of Nightingale, almost exclusively based on unpublished material from the Verney Collections at Claydon and from archival documents from about 200 archives around the world, some of which had been published by Lynn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"