Her "Notes on Hospitals" (1859) revolutionised the theory
of hospital construction and hospital management. She was
immediately recognised as the leading expert upon all the
questions involved; her advice flowed unceasingly and in all
directions, so that there is no great hospital today which does
not bear upon it the impress of her mind. Nor was this all. With
the opening of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St.
Thomas's Hospital (1860), she became the founder of modern
nursing.
But a terrible crisis was now fast approaching. Sidney Herbert
had consented to undertake the root and branch reform of the War
Office. He had sallied forth into that tropical jungle of
festooned obstructiveness, of intertwisted irresponsibilities, of
crouching prejudices, of abuses grown stiff and rigid with
antiquity, which for so many years to come was destined to lure
reforming Ministers to their doom. 'The War Office,' said Miss
Nightingale, 'is a very slow office, an enormously expensive
office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be
entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of
the sub-departments by every other.' It was true; and of course,
at the, first rumour of a change, the old phalanx of reaction was
bristling with its accustomed spears. At its head stood no longer
Dr.
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