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Intermittently bedridden from 1857, I kept working from home and did pioneering work in hospital planning and sanitary design that spread quickly across Britain and the world.

In the 1870s I mentored Linda Richards and gave her the training and knowledge to found high-quality nursing schools in the United States and Japan, as the Nightingale plan spread abroad.

I argued for autonomous nursing leadership: a new style of matron with full control and discipline over her nursing staff, answerable for nursing rather than to the medical staff.

Collecting evidence for the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, I concluded that poor living conditions killed most soldiers, and I made sanitation the centre of my later research and reform.

In Notes on Nursing I argued that the knowledge of keeping the body free of disease belongs to everyone, distinct from medical knowledge that only a profession holds.

With the Nightingale Fund I founded the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas' Hospital, the first official nurses' training programme; its graduates staffed workhouses and led major hospitals.

I built a repeatable method for training nurses: a funded school in a working hospital, a written curriculum, graduates placed in hard settings, and matrons given full control of their staff.