Florence Nightingale 133 Another, and a quaint example of conservatism on Miss Nightingale's part, was her great dislike of the ' ' germ theory. ' ' She expressed this at times in the wittiest epigrams. It seems as if she thought the belief in germs would weaken the doctrines of sanitation in which she believed so strongly, and from some lines in her writings one may gather that she remained true to the belief in the spon- taneity of diseases. We point out these evidences of fallibility because an attitude of uncritical adora- tion for a great person is unintelligent, and no one more than Miss Nightingale would have been dis- pleased by it. Miss Nightingale's personality was so fascinating that she was literally adored by men and women as if she had been a semi-deity. Her mental „. „. t-x Miss Night- brilliancy and her wide learning made ingale's her conversation and letters absorbingly Personality interesting. Her "Life" shows this vividly, and there is nothing in biography more engrossing than her written comments on books and people. She died in 1910, aged a little more than ninety years, and was quietly buried, by her wish, in the little churchyard at East Wellow, though she might have rested in Westminster Abbey, had not her family respected her desire for simplicity in death, as in life.
