Nursing in India type of nursing. In 1664 the East India Company started a hospital for soldiers in a house at Fort St.George, Madras. The first sisters were sent from St Thomas' Hospital, London to this military hospital. In 1797 a Lying-in-Hospital (maternity) for the poor of Madras was built with the help of subscriptions by John Underwood. In 1854 the government sanctioned a training school for midwives in Madras. Florence Nightingale was the first woman to have great influence over nursing in India and had a close knowledge of Indian conditions, especially in the army. She was interested in the nursing service
Florence Nightingale "Eminent Victorians". Strachey regarded Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who was both personally intolerable and admirable in her achievements. Cecil Woodham-Smith, like Strachey, relied heavily on Cook's "Life" in her 1950 biography, though she did have access to new family material preserved at Claydon. In 2008, Mark Bostridge published a major new life of Nightingale, almost exclusively based on unpublished material from the Verney Collections at Claydon and from archival documents from about 200 archives around the world, some of which had been published by Lynn McDonald in her projected sixteen-volume edition of the "Collected Works of Florence Nightingale"