Florence Nightingale
- Born
- 12 May 1820
- Died
- 13 August 1910 (age 90)
Florence Nightingale was known as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ for her nursing of soldiers during the Crimean War, when she made night-time rounds of the wards. She is known for transforming nursing and her influence is still felt in modern healthcare. However, it was her work as a statistician that helped to bring these changes about.
Nightingale was born into a wealthy, liberal family, in an era when women of her class were supposed to just get married and raise a family, but she felt she had a calling to do something more. Her family believed in education for women, so she studied a variety of subjects, including mathematics, Latin and Greek. She met a number of Victorian intellectuals, including the mathematician Charles Babbage. Fascinated with mathematics, she took extra tuition in the subject, and studied statistics relating to public health and hospitals. She was a deeply religious woman and saw statistics as a way of understanding God’s work and purpose.
At the time, nursing had a reputation as a job for poor, elderly women and was associated with drunkenness, bad language and a casual attitude to patients. However, Nightingale believed that nursing was her vocation and persuaded her parents to let her study at a hospital in Germany. At the age of 33, she became superintendent of a women’s hospital in Harley Street.
In 1854, she was invited by the Minister of War to oversee the introduction of female nurses into military hospitals in Turkey, to look after soldiers injured in the Crimean War. The hospitals were filthy and poorly resourced. The record keeping was poor and inconsistent, as each hospital had its own system of naming and classifying diseases.
the ‘lady with the lamp’ was also a pioneering and passionate statistician. She understood the influential role of statistics and used them to support her convictions.
Eileen Magnello, in Florence Nightingale: The compassionate statistician.
Nightingale collected data during the Crimean campaign which provided statistical evidence that much of the mortality was due to conditions in the hospitals. Her figures showed that unsanitary living conditions led to diseases such as typhus, typhoid and cholera.
On her return to Britain she established the Nightingale Fund and the money raised allowed her to continue to reform nursing in hospitals. Money from the fund was used to establish the first professional training school for nurses in 1860; the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. She also established a School for Midwifery at King’s College Hospital and she inspired the founding of the International Red Cross.
Nightingale used statistical charts to aid her arguments, showing that more men had died from disease than from their wounds. She is credited with inventing a form of the pie chart known as the polar area diagram to illustrate seasonal mortality rates in the field hospital she worked at. This was divided into twelve equal segments to represent each month of the year. It was used to help persuade the Government and medical community that better sanitation would lead to fewer deaths in both civilian and military hospitals.
In 1858, Nightingale was the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Accessing and understand statistical data is a crucial part of the medical sciences today.