Florence Nightingale Museum Florence Nightingale Museum The Florence Nightingale Museum is located at St Thomas' Hospital, which faces the Palace of Westminster across the River Thames in South Bank, central London, England. It is open to the public seven days a week. It re-opened on 12 May 2010 following an extensive £1.4m refurbishment. The museum tells the real story of Florence Nightingale, "the lady with the lamp", from her Victorian childhood to her experiences in the Crimean, through to her years as an ardent campaigner for health reform. Nightingale is recognised as the founder of modern nursing in the United Kingdom. The new
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.