Thanks to Miss Nightingale and other pioneers, the fifty years that have passed since then have made Mrs. Grundy a little less Grundyish, but in those days she considered the whole business a terrible venture, and was too much occupied with the idea of possible love affairs between the doctors and nurses to realize what good work was being done. The first year was a very anxious one for Miss Nightingale, but all the world knows now how her experiment has justified itself and how her prayers have been answered; for it was in prayer that she found her “quietness and confidence” through those first months of tension when the enemy was watching and four probationers had to be dismissed, though their ranks were speedily filled up by others. At the end of the year, from among those who were placed on the register, six received appointments at St. Thomas’s and two took work in infirmaries. There was special need of good nurses in workhouse infirmaries, and there was also throughout the whole country a crying need for nurses carefully trained in midwifery: lack of knowledge, for instance, had greatly increased the danger of puerperal fever, a scourge against which Miss Nightingale was one of the first to contend; and it had been wisely decided that while two-thirds of the fund should go to the work at St. Thomas’s, one-third should be used for special training of nurses in these branches at King’s College. “How has the tone and state of hospital nurses been raised?” Miss Nightingale asks in her little book on “Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor,” published in 1876. “By, more than anything else, making the hospital such a home as good young women—educated young women—can live and nurse in; and, secondly, by raising hospital nursing into such a profession as these can earn an honourable livelihood in.” In her “Notes on Hospitals,” published in 1859, she pointed out what she considered the four radical defects in hospital construction—namely:— 1. The agglomeration of a large number of sick under the same roof. 2. Deficiency of space. 3. Deficiency of ventilation. 4. Deficiency of light. How magnificently builders have since learned to remedy such defects may be seen in the Nightingale Wing of St. Thomas’s Hospital. The block system on which St. Thomas’s Hospital is built is what Miss Nightingale has always recommended, each block being divided from the next by a space of 125 feet, across which runs a double corridor by means of which they communicate with one another. Each has three tiers of wards above the ground floor.