After the Crimean War the Nightingale Training School was set up at St. Thomas' Hospital, which also imposed a strict uniform on its nurses. Probationers were required to wear a short, square-looking cap that Miss Nightingale almost certainly helped to design. Florence never worked as a nurse at the hospital. Popular images of Miss Nightingale suggest that she always wore a head covering (Figures 2-4), but not a nurse's cap. (Rebecca Lodge, personal communication, March 20, 2011)
Figure 2. Florence Nightingale wearing her customary cap. Library of Congress.
Figure 3. Florence Nightingale's cap on display. Image courtesy of Florence Nightingale Museum Trust, London, England.
Figure 4. Florence Nightingale (center) in her later years, surrounded by the probationers of St. Thomas' Hospital wearing their mandatory caps. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London
Nurse's Cap: Function and Fashion
The cap soon became an inseparable part of a nurse's uniform. Initially the rationale for wearing a cap was sanitary: It contained and covered the long hair that women still wore at the turn of the century. In the 1870s, a head nurse at the Connecticut Training School for Nurses exclaimed, "What shall I do with Miss X? She appeared at breakfast with her long hair curling down her back." Caps were quickly introduced at the school, and "no one needs now to be told that bushy hair is out of place in a sick room."[4]
The earliest "mob caps" or "dust caps" large enough to cover the hair (Figure 5) were replaced before the end of the 19th century by smaller, often peaked caps that covered only the knot of hair on top of the head (Figures 5-7).