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 premiering in London in 1929 with Edith Evans in the title role. It did not portray her as an entirely sympathetic character and draws much characterisation from Lytton Strachey's biography of her in "Eminent Victorians". It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1951. In 2009, a stage musical play representation of Nightingale entitled "The Voyage of the Lass" was produced by the Association of Nursing Service Administrators of the Philippines. In 1912, a biographical silent film titled "The Victoria Cross", starring Julia Swayne Gordon as Nightingale, was released, followed in 1915 by another silent film, "Florence