Happy Birthday Florence Nightingale: Nurse, Statistician, Feminist

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the first woman member of the Royal Statistical Society (in London, the title is unqualified since there were no other statistical societies). I've written a bit about her before in my post The Lady with the Polar Chart. She was Florence Nightingale, who was most famous for revolutionizing nursing during the Crimean War. Wikipedia says she "became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of 'The Lady with the Lamp' making rounds of wounded soldiers at night." In fact, what she should be most famous for, is inventing some of the first infographics and, in particular, showing that more soldiers were being killed by preventable unsanitary conditions than from being wounded in battle. Combining her statistical knowledge with her nursing knowledge, she made changes, and the death rate in the field hospitals was reportedly reduced from 42% to 2%. Some of the reduction came from introducing very basic sanitary practices such as handwashing.

Florence was born in Florence, Italy. (In Italian, Florence is called Firenze. So one immediate question is why Firenze is called Florence in English. Actually, since it was called Florentia in Roman times, the more interesting question is why it came to be called Firenze in Italian. It seems that in old Italian it became Fiorenza first, sort of halfway between the old Roman name and the modern name. But other languages kept the old Latin name: Florence in English, but Florencia in Spanish and Florenz in German.) Anyway, obviously Florence Nightingale was named after the city of her birth, where she was born to a wealthy British family. Her family moved back to England the following year.

Her father believed women should be educated, and he personally taught her mathematics, writing, Italian, Latin, Greek, philosophy, and history. As a young woman, she also traveled extensively, not just back to Italy but also to Greece and Egypt. And also to Germany where she received her first medical training at Kaiserwerth-am-Rhein. She then returned to London and worked in Harley Street, now, and presumably then, the London street most associated with medicine.

Crimean War

In 1854, news reached London about the horrific conditions in the Crimean War. (In those days, Crimea was part of Russia. In 1954, it was transferred from the Russian part of the USSR to the Ukrainian part. And your guess is as good as mine as to its current official status.) I had forgotten just who the antagonists in the Crimean War were. On one side was the Russian Empire, and the other was an alliance between the British, the Ottoman Empire, the French, and (I bet you can't guess) Sardinia. Sardinia is one of the two big islands in the Mediterranean to the West of Italy, the other being Corsica. Sardinia today is part of Italy and Corsica is part of France. Sardinia was its own kingdom in those days, including a lot of mainland states in what is now Northwest Italy, and even as far West as Nice (Nizza). The boundary appears to have been the river Var so today's trivia fact is that Nice Airport used to be in Sardinia.

The Crimean War was one of the first after the invention of photography. A photographer called Roger Fenton took many photos. For example, on the left here is the "Valley of the Shadow of Death" made famous by Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. You can see the cannonballs all over the road.

Florence along with nearly 40 other volunteer nurses went to Crimea. There was also a Sanitary Commission that fixed some of the identified problems, such as improving ventilation and cleaning the sewers. But she was sufficiently prominent that when a fund was set up for the training of nurses in the Crimea that it was called the Nightingale Fund. Back in London, she used the fund to set up a school for training nurses at St Thomas' Hospital. It still exists, now the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, part of King's College London (which is part of the University of London).

Books and Charts

In 1859, she wrote Notes on Nursing for the school (and widely used at other schools of nursing).

Later that same year she collaborated with Harriet Martineau on the book England and Her Soldiers. The chart that Florence Nightingale is most famous for is a fold-out frontispiece at the start of the book. Here is a picture I took of the book in The Science Museum (again no "London" since...no other science museums when it was created). It is in the Information Age exhibition. This is known as a "polar chart" or sometimes as a "Nightingale rose diagram".

Here is a clearer version of the key part of the chart. The way it works is that each sector on the chart shows a month of the year (labeled at the outside). Then the colors show how many soldiers died from various causes: red is death from wounds, blue is preventable deaths from unsanitary conditions and so on, and black are all other causes. Note that the chart is honest, in the sense that it is the areas of the subsectors that represent the statistic, not the linear distance from the center (which would have the effect of exaggerating whatever statistic gets the outer ring, in this case, the blue, which is quite large enough without any extra boost).

In 1859, the same year as both Notes on Nursing and England and Her Soldiers were published, she was elected as the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. Later, she would also be elected as an honorary member of the American Statistical Society, although I don't believe she ever visited the US. She was bedridden for the latter part of her life.

Feminism

She wrote hundreds of books and pamphlets during her life. A famous one was called Cassandra in which she protested about women being feminized into helplessness, in particular, her mother's and older sister's "indigent" lifestyles despite their education.

But she also despaired of some aspects of the nascent women's rights movement:

It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about “the want of a field” for them—when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get one.… 

I copied that quote out of The Life of Florence Nightingale, in two volumes published in 1913, which is out of copyright so you can read online or on a Kindle for free.

If you really want to go deep, Wilfred Laurier University Press published The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale in 16 volumes, each about $150. The introduction says:

In the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale all the surviving writing of Florence Nightingale will be published, much of it for the first time. Known as the heroine of the Crimean War and the major founder of the modern profession of nursing, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is revealed also as a scholar, theorist and social reformer of enormous scope and importance.

Other Women in Science

I mentioned above how the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing is part of King's College London. It is truly in central London, with an address on The Strand (which runs into Trafalgar Square). That is where Rosalind Franklin did her X-ray crystallography work that played a key part in the discovery of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson.

I like to say that there is an XKCD for everything. But there isn't one specifically on Florence Nightingale, so this is the best I can do:

And by the way, Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences (physics and chemistry). In our semiconductor world, John Bardeen won two Noble Prizes for physics, the first for the invention of the transistor (along with Shockley) and then for superconducting (along with Cooper and Schreiffer).

My favorite Nobel Prize quiz question, though, is "In what year did Einstein win the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics?" The answer is 1922. You can read the story in my post Discovery of the Electron.

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