Nursing became a respectable field of study mainly because of the efforts of Florence Nightingale. Her success at cutting the death rate of Britain's wounded soldiers during the Crimean War prompted the British government to found a nurses' training course on her return home. An agreement was made with St. Thomas's Hospital in London, and on this date in 1860, 15 students entered the first class of the hospital's Nightingale Training School for Nurses. The Nightingale system emphasized strict discipline, camaraderie and devotion to nursing as a vocation.

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