Collection charting the development of nursing education at St George's and related institutions from the 19th century to the present day.
The collection includes:
- Student registers, training and examination records, prospectuses and syllabuses
- Administrative records, including committee minutes, reports, rules and regulations
- Publications and printed material including books, newsletters and journals
- Papers, photographs and artefacts from St George’s Nurses’ League
- Personal papers, memoirs and memorabilia from individual nurses, including papers of matron Dame Muriel Powell (c.1910s-1970s)
- Photographs, including student photographs, group photographs and personal photo albums
- Artefacts and objects, including items of nurses' uniform, badges, medals, and medical instruments
- ‘Nurses’ Voices’ oral history project: interviews with over 100 former St George’s nurses and midwives (and related documentation), recorded 2003-2008
From in-job training at the hospital, nursing education was gradually formalised during the latter half of the 19th century. From 1882 onwards, probationer nurses were offered lectures by the medical school and hospital staff; these lectures developed into a more formal syllabus, becoming compulsory for probationers in the 1890s, and the first formal examinations were introduced in 1894. The archive charts the development of nursing education from the late 19th century to the 21st century, including important changes in the demographics of the nursing staff, such as the arrival of the Windrush generation.
The collection encompasses training of nurses at St George’s and related institutions: for instance, nursing training at Victoria Hospital for Children and Grove Hospital were merged with St George’s School of Nursing in the 1950s, leading to the establishment of a branch of the School of Nursing at Tooting, where St George’s Hospital and Medical School (later university) moved in the 1970s from Hyde Park Corner, central London.