Nightingale made it her mission to improve hygiene practices. She worked at a hospital that dealt with the cholera outbreak and unsanitary conditions that led to the rapid spread of the disease. After the Battle of Alma,  England was in an uproar about the neglect of their ill and injured soldiers. In late 1854, Nightingale received a letter from the Secretary of War that asked her to organize a corps of nurses to tend to the sick and fallen soldiers. To begin, she gathered together hundreds of scrub brushes and asked the least infirm patients to scrub the inside of the hospital from floor to ceiling. She also spent every single minute caring for each of the soldiers. Her work reduced the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds. She influenced nursing by improving the sanitary conditions of future hospitals. She made hospitals cleaner places. She showed that trained nurses and clean hospitals helped sick people get better.