If the Secretary of State carries out the Report, some of the most useful improvements will have originated with you." [202] The rate was 24.39 per 1000. Miss Nightingale found in the evidence a justification of her forebodings during past years. It disclosed evils comparable in kind, though not in extent, to those at Scutari and in the Crimea.[203] Supplies procurable had not been procured. Hospital equipment was incomplete. The cooking was defective, and so forth. These defects were due, Miss Nightingale considered, to the undoing of Sidney Herbert's work. The Purveyor's Department, reorganized by him and her, had been abolished. For the rest, their whole scheme of reorganization had been based on the regimental system, which had now been abandoned for a unitary system, though in time of war some return to the former was a necessity. Miss Nightingale did not wholly condemn these changes in themselves. What she complained of was that they had not been thought out in all the details or in terms of war. This was what she meant when she noted the progress of reorganization during previous years, and pronounced it lacking in administrative skill.[204] She now said that the changes must be accepted, and threw herself into the work of lending aid towards improvement. She saw and corresponded with the Director-General of the Army Medical Department, Dr. T. Crawford, than whom, she said, "we have not had such a man of unflagging energy since Alexander."[205] She made friends with many other army doctors. Among them was Surgeon-Major G. J. H. Evatt, who had seen service in India, and was now at the Royal Military Academy. He assisted Miss Nightingale in suggestions for the reorganization of the Army Hospital Corps in India, which she sent to Lord Ripon. She was consulted on revised regulations for various branches of the medical service. She was in constant communication with her old associates, Captain Galton and Dr. Sutherland, and she urged the former to keep the question of reform to the front by writing in the papers and magazines. [203] See especially the evidence of Lord Wolseley himself, summarized at pp. 35-36 of the _Report of the Army Hospital Services Inquiry Committee_, 1883. [204] Her points may be followed in detail in the article referred to below, p. 340, _n._ [205] Letter to Captain Galton, Nov. 28, 1883. VI