The passing of the night watch: night nursing reform in the London teaching hospitals, 1856-90.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a separate team of women called the "night watch" was responsible for the night nursing in the London teaching hospitals. Rough, uneducated, and frequently the "scrubbers," or charwomen, who cleaned the halls and stairways in the hospitals in the daytime, the night watchers came to be closely identified with Dickens's Sarah Gamp. As the century progressed, the expanding capabilities of the new academic medicine forced an improvement in the standard of nursing. The difficulty in finding clinically experienced nurses who were willing to work nights at an affordable price, however, made it possible for the night watchers to remain in the new professionally organized hospital long after such unskilled and undisciplined workers had been phased out of other areas of the late Victorian workforce. By the end of the century when hospitals began rotating partially trained probationer, or student, nurses onto nights, the night watchers finally disappeared from the teaching hospitals.