This noble ensample to his sheep he gaf, That first he wroughte and afterward he taught. CHAUCER. In the years succeeding her return from the Crimea Miss Nightingale, in addition to the important labours recorded in the foregoing chapter, was actively engaged with her pen. Her writings dealt with the subjects so near her heart of hospital reform, sick nursing and household sanitation. If the soldier needed hygienic reforms in barracks and camps, so did the great mass of the people in their own homes. Miss Nightingale’s interest in army reform did not absorb her attention to the neglect of civil matters. Her writings are distinguished not only by expert and technical knowledge, but by much homely practical wisdom. There is nothing of the blue-stocking about Florence Nightingale. She puts aside formulas, and with tender human feeling, enlivened by witty epigram and racy humour, goes right to the heart of her subject, particularly in regard to the needs and management of the sick. Her first published work after her return home was a statistical account of her distribution of the “Voluntary Contributions,” placed at her disposal for the sick soldiers, which has already been dealt with. In the following year (1858) she issued her _Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army_, which was of great value to the Commission on the War, then sitting, and led to the institution of many reforms. In 1859 Miss Nightingale published her _Notes on Hospitals_, the basis of which was a paper she prepared for the Social Science Association. “It may seem a strange principle,” she writes with grim humour, “to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality _in_ hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated _out of_ hospital would lead us to expect.” It was the knowledge of this unsatisfactory fact which led Miss Nightingale to thoroughly investigate the influence which hospital construction exercised on the death-rate of patients received into the wards. The result was her _Notes on Hospitals_, which in the enlarged edition, published in 1863, became a standard work on the subject. It is technical in character, and, in addition to recommendations on the conduct and arrangements of hospitals, gives plans for hospital construction. It covers the whole field from floors and walls to hospital furniture.