The Lady with the Lamp was also a pioneering data visualiser
Florence Nightingale is remembered walking hospital wards at night, but her sharpest weapon may have been a chart. She popularised the polar area diagram, a circular graph still used in data visualisation, to make statistics impossible to ignore. Some historians now think the press exaggerated her Crimean exploits; her reforms afterwards are undisputed.
Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 in a villa in Florence, during her wealthy parents' European tour, and named after the city, just as her sister Parthenope carried an old name for Naples. Her father, unusually for the era, personally taught his daughters languages, mathematics and more. At sixteen, on 7 February 1837, she felt the first of several calls from God to service; years passed, against resistance from her mother and sister, before that calling settled on nursing. She turned down a nine-year suitor, and on travels to Egypt and Greece rescued a little owl she named Athena and often carried in her pocket.
In 1853 she became superintendent of a London institution caring for sick gentlewomen, supported by a £500 annual allowance from her father. When reports of dreadful conditions reached Britain from the Crimean War, she led nurses to the barracks hospital at Scutari, opposite Constantinople, arriving in November 1854. Her team found overworked staff, scarce medicines, neglected hygiene and rampant infection. Her friend Sidney Herbert, then Secretary at War, helped make the mission possible.
She pressed for change, including handwashing, and after her appeal to The Times, ministers hired the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose ready-made hospital was built in England and sent out in pieces. One biographer credited her with cutting the death rate from 42 percent to 2 percent, whether through her own hygiene measures or by calling in a Sanitary Commission; recent commentators argue that contemporary media inflated her role.
Her lasting achievement came in 1860, when she opened a nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the world's first secular one and now part of King's College London. She wrote prolifically, often in plain English for readers with little schooling. The Nightingale Pledge and the Florence Nightingale Medal, nursing's highest international honour, carry her name. She died on 13 August 1910.
Source: Florence Nightingale
