Although caring women and midwives had treated the sick and brought babies into the world for centuries, nursing as a respected profession had a tough road to travel.

In England in the 1850s, Florence Nightingale brought nurses to the Crimea; in America during the Civil War, Clara Barton introduced nurses to battlefields and field hospitals, even to prison wards. However, the women who came to nurse the wounded were generally regarded as little better than "camp followers" — women who followed their men to war (not all of them wives) — and were left with menial tasks rather than meaningful ones, often in highly unsanitary conditions. Many of the nurses trusted to treat patients were men.

One of those men, Christian White, started a small hospital in Fort Collins in 1893. The county poor farm had a hospital as well, for the farm's residents. At the poor farm, housekeeping chores fell to the nurses, along with caring for patients.

By the late 19th century, nursing had become more professional and nurses more organized, so nursing schools began to emerge, primarily at hospitals. One started in Fort Collins in 1906 when the Fort Collins Hospital Association, a consortium of local physicians, built the privately funded Fort Collins Hospital at the southeast corner of Mathews and Magnolia streets.

The physicians taught the classes. While learning the finer points of infectious diseases, anesthesia, eye-ear-nose-and-throat conditions, anatomy, physiology and surgery, the nurses also did household chores. As they interacted with patients, they learned bed-making and other practical nursing skills. They were paid $10 a month, with the salary increasing to $12 a month by the third year.

Room and board were provided, but they had to pay for their own books and uniforms. The first graduating class consisted of four women. After receiving their diplomas, together they recited the Florence Nightingale pledge, a statement derived from the Hippocratic oath which read in part: "I solemnly pledge … to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully ... I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession and will hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping ...."

Meanwhile, at the poor farm hospital, which had moved onto the former county fairgrounds (where Poudre Valley Hospital is now) around 1900, nurses were on call 24 hours a day, every day. They stoked fires, cleaned rooms, served meals and cared for patients. A working farm, the facility had livestock and a garden, tended by ambulatory patients.

Nursing was to become more organized by leaps and bounds in the 20th century as it evolved into the highly respected profession it is today. Nurses' training gradually moved away from hospitals to colleges and universities, but here, as elsewhere, the groundwork was laid by these nursing pioneers.