ABSTRACT
In 2001, Sioban Nelson revolutionized thinking about religious nurses' impact on nursing with the publication of Say Little, Do Much. Bence Jones had succeeded in centralizing responsibility for nursing in the lady superintendent, and could now start work developing the new nursing service at King's College Hospital. It would be the beginning of a major reform in nursing: the establishment of a system which in 1874 the British Medical Journal would describe as the best system of nursing yet introduced. The construction of the training school as a religious sisterhood solved the social problem for ladies taking up hospital nursing and conferred respectability on working-class nurses. But it also unfortunately coincided with a climax of religious controversy in mid-nineteenth-century England. The massive immigration of unskilled Catholic Irish labourers who undercut English workers reached its peak during the famine years after 1845, precisely when St John's House was founded. The Irish influx exacerbated long-standing English anti-Catholicism.
