She recognised also that for this work a special training was needed. A nurse who had received a course of instruction in a hospital was not necessarily competent to nurse the poor in their own homes. Special knowledge and special experience were needed before a woman, however skilled in the technical side of nursing, could become a good district nurse. About the same period that Miss Nightingale was establishing and organising her Training School for Nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital, she was also working in conjunction with Mr. William Rathbone, M.P., and other philanthropic people to found a special training school for nurses for the poor. It was at her suggestion that this branch of pioneer work was started in connection with the Liverpool Infirmary, which had already made some provision on similar lines. The prospectus for the Liverpool Training Home for Nurses was made public in 1861–2, and a commodious building was subsequently erected in the grounds of the infirmary. In 1865 Miss Nightingale wrote an introduction to a work describing the “Origin and Organisation of the Liverpool School and Home for Nurses.” “It is the old story, often told!” she writes, “but this book opens a new chapter of it. It gives us hope for a better state of things. An institution for training nurses in connection with the infirmary has been built and organised. This is a matter of necessity, because all who wish to nurse efficiently must learn how to nurse _in a hospital_. “Nursing, especially that most important of all its branches--nursing of the sick poor at home--is no amateur work. To do it as it ought to be done requires knowledge, practice, self-abnegation, and as is so well said here, direct obedience to and activity under the highest of all Masters and from the highest of all motives. It is an essential part of the daily service of the Christian Church. It has never been otherwise. It has proved itself superior to all religious divisions, and is destined, by God’s blessing, to supply an opening the great value of which, in our densely peopled towns, has been unaccountably overlooked until within these few years.” With such noble words did Florence Nightingale usher in a movement which has now spread to all parts of the kingdom. There is not now a workhouse infirmary which has not its trained nurses in place of the rough-handed and unskilled inmate, nor any town and few villages which have not some provision for nursing the sick poor in their own homes, and our beloved Queen Victoria found it the worthiest object to which she could devote the people’s offering in commemoration of her Jubilee. The main objects of the pioneer Training Home at Liverpool were:-- 1. To provide thoroughly educated professional nurses for the poor. 2. To provide district nurses for the poor. 3. To provide sick nurses for private families.