Sarah Elizabeth Wardroper

Sarah Elizabeth Wardroper (née Bisshopp; 12 November 1813 – 14 December 1892) was an English nurse who was matron of St Thomas' Hospital, London, and the first superintendent of the Nightingale School of Nursing at that hospital.

Biography Wardroper was born at West Burton, West Sussex in 1813. She was married in 1840 to Woodland Wyatt Wardroper a medical doctor in Arundel who died in 1849.

A 42-year-old widow with four children, Wardroper had had no nursing experience apart from looking after her own family, nevertheless her general level of education, good organizational skills and appropriate manner were sufficient for her 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.

On Wardroper's death in East Grinstead, aged 79, Florence Nightingale wrote, "The Reform of Sick Nursing and the Late Mrs Wardroper".

A memorial to Wardroper in the chapel of St Thomas's Hospital was unveiled in May 1894 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, a marble bas-relief representing the Good Samaritan sculpted by George Tinworth in 1893-94.