Happy birthday to founder of modern nursing, social reformer, statistician, data visualization innovator & writer Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)!
Nightingale earned the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" during the Crimean War, from a phrase used by The Times, describing her as a “ministering angel” making her solitary rounds of the hospital at night with “a little lamp in her hand”. 🧵1/n
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The image was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem Santa Filomena.
Behind Nightingale is her ‘Diagram of Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East’ plotted as a polar area diagram – though not her own statistical & data visualization innovation, sometimes called a Nightingale Rose Diagram. It illustrates causes of death in the military hospital she managed during the Crimean War. April 1855 to March 1856 is shown on the left and April 1854 to March 1855 to the right. 🧵2/
When she researched the causes of mortality, looking back at the data, she saw clearly that the lack of hygiene was a far greater risk to soldiers’ lives than being wounded. This "Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" was published in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army and sent to Queen Victoria in 1858.
This experience influenced her later career and she campaigned for sanitary living conditions, 🧵3/
knowing how dangerous unsanitary conditions can be to survival. She also made extensive use of similar polar area diagrams on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War, or sanitation conditions of the British army in rural India, to make such statistics transparent to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports.
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In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. She later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
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