In a concluding chapter, Miss Nightingale refers to the dangers of “reckless physicking by amateur females,” and tells of the lady who, having procured a prescription for a blue pill which suited her during one indisposition, proceeded to dose not only herself but her family too, “for all complaints upon all occasions.” Then there are the women who have no ideas beyond calomel and aperients, and the Lady Bountifuls who dose their poorer neighbours with a favourite prescription when it would be doing more good if they persuaded the people to “remove the dung-hill from before the door, to put in a window which opens, or an Arnott’s ventilator, or to cleanse and lime-wash their cottages.” She has some last words to say on nursing as a profession, and gives a humorous little thrust at “the commonly received idea among men, and even among women themselves, that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.” “This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be school-master because he was ‘past keeping the pigs.’” Miss Nightingale sums up the matter with some condensed wisdom on the question as to whether women are fitted for the medical and other professions. She urges them to keep clear of “the jargon” which impels a woman on the one hand to do things simply to imitate men, and on the other to refrain from doing what she has the power to accomplish simply because it has hitherto been considered man’s work. “Surely woman,” she writes, “should bring the best she has, _whatever_ that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, but listening to the ‘what people will say’ opinion, to the voices from without? No one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without. You want to do the thing that is good, whether people call it ‘suitable for a woman’ or not. Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”