Nurse education qualification courses have graduate status. Traditionally, from the times prior to Florence Nightingale, nursing was seen as an apprenticeship, often undertaken in religious institutes such as convents by young women, although there has always been a proportion of male nurses, especially in mental health services. In 1860 Nightingale set up the first nurse training school at St Thomas' Hospital, London. Nightingale's curriculum was largely base around nursing practice, with instruction focused upon the need for hygiene and task competence. Her methods are reflected in her "Notes on Nursing", (1898). Some other nurses at that time, notably Ethel Gordon Fenwick, were
Florence Nightingale her thoughts, she wrote "Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth". This was an 829-page, three-volume work, which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never published in its entirety. An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by Wilfrid Laurier University, as volume 11 of a 16 volume project, the "Collected Works of Florence Nightingale". The best known of these essays, called "Cassandra", was previously published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in "The Cause", a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of