In 1865 she was sent by the sisterhood to Walsall, to take part in the nursing in a small cottage hospital. Towards the end of the year she received orders from the sisterhood to leave this work and take work as a nurse in a private case in the South of England. Walsall had not been trained to habits of unquestioning obedience; its inhabitants and the managers of the little hospital had already discovered Sister Dora’s fine qualities as a nurse. They resisted the order that would have deprived them of her services. While negotiations on this subject were proceeding between the Walsall people and the sisterhood at Coatham, news reached Miss Pattison from Hauxwell, to say that her father was dangerously ill and much desired to see her. She telegraphed to the sisterhood, telling them of her father’s serious illness, and asking permission to visit him. The answer, which was returned almost immediately, was a blank refusal, and she was bidden to proceed at once to Devonshire to nurse a stranger. Incredible as this may seem, it is still more incredible that the order was obeyed. Miss Pattison had not escaped the paralysis of moral sense which this cast-iron system produces; she turned her back on her home and proceeded to Devonshire. Her father died almost immediately, without ever seeing his daughter again. The shock of this event roused Sister Dora from the lethargy from which she had suffered. She was almost broken-hearted, and deeply resented the dictation to which she had been subjected. She ought to have seen, and probably did see, that the will, like all other powers of the mind and body, with which each one of us is endowed, is given to us to be used; we are responsible for its right use, and when we use it wrongly, as she did in this case (for it must have needed a very strong effort of will to resist the appeal of love and duty), it is we ourselves who must bear the punishment and endure the anguish of our fault. She did not immediately sever her connection with the sisterhood, but she began from that time to be less completely in thraldom to it. She finally quitted it in 1875, under circumstances which have not been made public. When a friend questioned her as to the cause, Sister Dora’s only reply was, “I am a woman, and not a piece of furniture.”