Miss Nightingale spent nearly ten years in studying nursing before she considered herself qualified to undertake the sanitary direction of even a small hospital. She went from place to place, not confining her studies to her own country. She spent about a year at the hospital and nursing institution at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine in 1849. This had been founded by Pastor Fliedner, and was under the care of a Protestant Sisterhood who had perfected the art of sick nursing to a degree unknown at that time in any other part of Europe. From Kaiserswerth she visited institutions for similar purposes, in other parts of Germany, and in France and Italy. It is obvious she could not have devoted the time and money which all this preparation must have cost if she had not been a member of a wealthy family. The fact that she was so makes her example all the more valuable. She was the daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy country gentleman of Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and Embly Park in Hampshire. As a young girl she had the choice of all that wealth, luxury, and fashion could offer in the way of self-indulgence and ease, and she set them all on one side for the sake of learning how to benefit suffering humanity by making sick nursing an art in England. In the letter already quoted Miss Nightingale gives, in reply to a special appeal, advice to young women about their work: “1. I would say also to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it, as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise. No one should attempt to teach the Greek language until he is master of the language; and this he can only become by hard study. 2. If you are called to man’s work, do not exact a woman’s privileges—the privilege of inaccuracy, of weakness, ye muddleheads. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God’s business succeed; for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to inefficiency, to sketchy and unfinished work.”