Crimean war painting Battle of Mišar by Afanasij Scheloumoffįlorence Nightingale understood the power of statistics as a tool to inform, educate and enlighten, was incredibly passionate about their proper use, as this quote, featured in an article by Samuel Luke Tunstall about featuring Nightingale in statistics education, illustrates: Nightingale, unlike her contemporaries, used visual information to tell a story and, crucially, she made it accessible and understandable to non-specialists. Victorian statisticians and mathematicians preferred tables because they presented the data in its entirety, and if they did use graphics they did so to explore data in depth, not to extrapolate findings and use them to support and illustrate a narrative. As Alison Hedley describes in her article Florence Nightingale and Victorian data visualisation, ‘what made Nightingale’s graphs particularly iconic was their powerful use of visual rhetoric to make an argument about data’. While appealing to the British government and military regarding the importance of sanitation and for resources to improve healthcare conditions, Nightingale employed the use of carefully-designed polar area diagrams, a close relation of the pie chart, in order to convey the mortality rates of soldiers in the Crimea and their causes of death. Nightingale’s famous polar area diagramĪs stated by Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald in Florence Nightingale, statistics and the Crimean war, ‘The methodology that she acquired post war in analysing what went wrong would ground her decades-long campaigns for social and healthcare reform’. Upon her return to Britain after the war, determined for lessons to be learnt, she set about compiling statistical analysis of military losses in the Crimea, working with noted medical statistician William Farr.
![rose diagram florence nightingale rose diagram florence nightingale](https://kigetph1sl-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Nightingale-mortality-featured.jpg)
![rose diagram florence nightingale rose diagram florence nightingale](http://www.mutanteggplant.com/vitro-nasu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1florence_nightingale_fluid_small.jpg)
Credited with drastically reducing the mortality rate of the field hospital in which she worked, Nightingale found the number of military lives lost throughout the Crimean War utterly unacceptable and was convinced that the vast majority of deaths were due to poor conditions such as bad drainage, poor ventilation, overcrowding, and contaminated water. Nightingale, a gifted mathematician who had excelled in the subject under her father’s tutelage, was to take a radically different approach. In Nightingale’s time, however, statisticians tended to prefer tables for the organisation of information, no matter how large the data set. In today’s digital world we are no strangers to the display of data in visual formats infographics with eye-catching and easy to interpret charts and graphs in bright colours are often the norm.
![rose diagram florence nightingale rose diagram florence nightingale](https://www.uh.edu/engines/coxcombchart.jpg)
The Lady with the Lamp popular lithograph, reproduction of a painting by Henrietta Rae, 1891 “To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.” While one could certainly write reams dedicated to the dissection of Nightingale’s credentials as a revolutionary figure in nursing, I would like to focus this blog on her innovative use of statistics, and I have used the electronic resources available through LibrarySearch to do so. There has been much discussion and some disagreement between scholars and researchers as to whether Nightingale’s achievements have been overstated, and she has faced criticism regarding her interactions and attitudes towards fellow wartime nurse, Mary Seacole. It was during the Crimean War that Nightingale rose to fame, gaining a reputation as a comforting presence to the soldiers whose care she administered, and advocating for sanitary conditions to reduce deaths through disease and infection. Indeed, she was a pioneer in the visual presentation of information, displaying data through means that were at the time truly novel.īorn to a wealthy and well-connected family, Nightingale defied the wishes of her family and the conventions expected of women of her status to fulfil what she felt was a calling from God for her to become a nurse. While she is regarded by many as the founder of modern nursing, what is perhaps less well known is her prowess as a mathematician and statistician. In addition to this bicentenary, 2020 is the World Health Organisation’s ‘Year of the Nurse and Midwife’ so a look at Nightingale’s life and work feels especially relevant.
![rose diagram florence nightingale rose diagram florence nightingale](https://vizzlo.com/img/vizzards/nightingales-rose-chart.png)
With the construction of the NHS’s COVID-19 critical care field hospitals, known as Nightingale hospitals in England, the legacy of ‘the lady with the lamp’ is as relevant and prevalent as ever. Next month, 12 th May to be precise, sees the 200 th birthday of Florence Nightingale.