The example of St. Thomas's was followed by others. Florence Nightingale was, indeed, the effective founder of the nursing sys tem in England. She also turned her attention to the question of army sanitary reform and army hospitals, and to the work of the Army Medical College at Chatham. She wrote a candid official report on the working of the army medical department in the Crimea, and in i858 printed her Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army. The Boo pages of these notes formed the basis of the Royal Commission to enquire into the health of the army, and are a classic in the literature on army medicine.
If Florence Nightingale lived a life of the strictest retirement she was consulted constantly by the authorities, and expressed her views with great clearness and vigour. The foundation of the hospital schools of nursing in London was followed, at her sug gestion, by the formation of a school at Liverpool infirmary (1862). She helped to establish various institutions for nursing, from the East London Nursing society in 1868 to the Queen's Jubilee Nursing institute in 189o. She would have liked to have gone out to India during the Mutiny. She was not invited to go, but she took the deepest interest in the progress of sanitation and of health measures in India, and was constantly in corre spondence with the secretary of State for India, and with high officials in India up to 1872.
In her later years, from 1872, when, as she says, she "went out of office," she made a close study of Plato, under the direction of her friend Benjamin Jowett, and of the Christian mystics. She still maintained an enormous correspondence with the heads of the nursing profession and with members of the rank and file. She sought to promote rural hygiene, and was indefatigable in de manding health missionaries for Indian villages. Generally she was a prisoner in her room, where she received favoured visitors from time to time, but she never went out except occasionally for a drive in the park in the early morning. She was 87 when the Order of Merit was brought to her in 1907. Three years later she died in her house at South street on Aug. 13, 191o, and was buried at East Wellow, Hampshire, on Aug. 20.
See Sir E. Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale (2 vols., 1913) ; M. A. Nutting and L. L. Dock, History of Nursing (New York, 19o7), which contains a bibliography of Miss Nightingale's writings; and a sketch by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1918).