ABSTRACT
The Nightingale nurse, young, trained and dedicated, quickly came to symbolize the modern nurse. The Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry helped set up the Institution of Nursing Sisters, but its purpose was to provide domiciliary nurses, and it never had an agenda to reform hospital nursing. The primary reason for reform was that the new medical therapeutics needed a much more disciplined, conscientious workforce. Medical practitioners and hospital administrators worked to upgrade the nursing staff so that they could implement the new more successful treatments. Their first solution was the ward system, with a Sister or head nurse in charge of the ward. Nineteenth-century England was a society where it was taken for granted that Christianity, as exemplified by the state Church, was the foundation of morality. The Anglican Sisters' vision of nursing, with its professional autonomy and clinically based education, remains a nursing ideal.
