After her improvised kitchen was in working order, Miss Nightingale next set to work to establish a laundry for the hospital and institute a system for disinfecting the clothes of fever and cholera patients. Up to the time of her arrival there was practically little washing done, the “authorities” had only succeeded in getting _seven_ shirts washed, and no attempt was made to separate the bed-linen and garments of infectious patients from those suffering only from wounds. Washing contracts were in existence, but availed little. At the General Hospital the work was in the hands of a corps of eight or ten Armenians. There was no fault to be found with the manner in which they did the work, only they stole so habitually that when a man sent his shirt to be washed he was never sure that he would get it back again, and in consequence the sick were unwilling to part with their garments. At the Barrack Hospital a Levantine named Uptoni had the washing contract, but broke it so repeatedly that the sick were practically without clean linen, except when they were able to get the soldiers’ wives to do a little washing for them. Such was the state of affairs in a hospital where two to three thousand men lay wounded and sick. Miss Nightingale hired a house close to the hospital and set up an efficient laundry, partly out of her private funds, and partly out of money subscribed to _The Times_ fund started for the relief of the soldiery. She had it fitted up with coppers and regulated under sanitary conditions, and there five hundred shirts and one hundred and fifty other articles were washed each week. There was a further difficulty to meet, and that was to provide the men with a change of linen while the soiled went to the wash. Many of the wounded had been obliged to leave their knapsacks behind and had no clothing save the dirty and dilapidated garments in which they arrived. In the course of the first three months Miss Nightingale provided the men with ten thousand shirts from her own private sources. There was the same scarcity in surgical dressings, and the nurses had to employ every minute that could be spared from the bedside of the sufferers in making lint, bandages, amputation stumps, and in sewing mattresses and making pillows. Great confusion existed with regard to the dispensing of drugs. The apothecaries’ store at Scutari, which supplied the hospitals and indeed the whole army in the Crimea, was in the same state of confusion as everything else. The orderlies left to dispense often did not know what the store contained. On one occasion Mrs. Bracebridge, Miss Nightingale’s invaluable friend and helper, applied three times for chloride of lime and was told there was none. Miss Nightingale insisted on a more thorough search being made, with the result that 90 lbs. were discovered.