After that, her
direct connection with the Army came to an end, and her energies
began to turn more and more completely towards more general
objects. Her work upon hospital reform assumed enormous
proportions; she was able to improve the conditions in
infirmaries and workhouses; and one of her most remarkable papers
forestalls the recommendations of the Poor Law Commission of
1909. Her training, school for nurses, with all that it involved
in initiative, control, responsibillity, and combat, would have
been enough in itself to have absorbed the whole efforts of at
least two lives of ordinary vigour. And at the same time her work
in connection with India, which had begun with the Sanitary
Commission on the Indian Army, spread and ramified in a multitude
of directions. Her tentacles reached the India Office and
succeeded in establishing a hold even upon those slippery high
places. For many years it was de rigueur for the newly appointed
Viceroy, before he left England, to pay a visit to Miss
Nightingale.
After much hesitation, she had settled down in a small house in
South Street, where she remained for the rest of her life. That
life was a very long one; the dying woman reached her ninety-
first year. Her ill health gradually diminished; the crises of
extreme danger became less frequent, and at last altogether
ceased; she remained an invalid, but an invalid of a curious
character--an invalid who was too weak to walk downstairs and who
worked far harder than most Cabinet Ministers.
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