General nursing
The first nursing badges were the medals awarded by St John’s House, the training institution founded in 1848 by the Anglican Nursing Order of St John on the model of the Deaconess’ Hospital at Kaiserswerth. The badge was cross shaped with an oval inset at the centre showing St John. The sisters became the nursing staff of London, provincial and overseas hospitals. In 1854 a group of the sisters joined Florence Nightingale in the Crimea at Scutari. After the Crimean War ended, the Nightingale Training School was set up in St Thomas' Hospital, London (1860) and that general model of training came to be adopted throughout the whole country. The school issued a badge designed by Alicia Lloyd Still with a profile of Nightingale at the centre of a blue enamel Maltese cross from 1925.
Elizabeth Fry, similarly inspired by the training school at Kaiserswerth, established an institute for middle-class Protestant nurses at Devonshire Square in London in the early 18th century. The trainees went to work at Guy’s Hospital daily, but were not taught nursing theory.
During the 1880s, a few hospitals introduced prize medals, in gold, silver and bronze, for their best nurses. A handful, such as the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, were issuing badges to their certificated nurses during the 1890s. Thereafter, an increasing number of hospitals issued nursing badges until it became the norm. Some, like the Nightingale School from 1925, issued badges retrospectively to nurses who had trained before the introduction of the hospital badge.