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
King's College London had become independent of King's College Hospital at the foundation of the National Health Service in 1948, mergers with Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College of Science and Technology in 1985, and the Institute of Psychiatry in 1997. In 1998 the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals merged with King's to form the King's College London GKT School of Medical Education. Also in 1998 Florence Nightingale's original training school for nurses merged with the King's Department of Nursing Studies as the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery. The same year King's acquired the former