The Statistician Who Saved Lives: Florence Nightingale’s Contributions
Florence Nightingale? What is she famous for?
Florence Nightingale is best remembered for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War and her contribution towards the reform of the sanitary conditions in military field hospitals. However, what is less well known about this amazing woman is her love of mathematics, especially statistics, and how this love played an important part in her life’s work [1]. She was known for her night rounds to aid the wounded, establishing her image as the ‘Lady with the Lamp.’ [2]
Story about her life
Florence Nightingale Early Life
Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, the city which inspired her name. The younger of two daughters, Nightingale was part of an affluent British clan that belonged to elite social circles. Her mother, Frances Nightingale, hailed from a family of merchants and took pride in socializing with people of prominent standing. Despite her mother’s interests, Nightingale herself was reportedly awkward in social situations and preferred to avoid being the center of attention whenever possible. Strong-willed, she often butted heads with her mother, whom she viewed as overly controlling. [2]
Florence Nightingale Crimean War
The Crimean War (1853–6) was the first high-technology conflict of the modern age — an age of railways, telegraph wires, photography and high-explosive shells. And it was a war of shocking statistics, with tens of thousands of soldiers dying. Florence Nightingale and her team came to run hospitals for wounded soldiers evacuated from Crimea. Her work in the Scutari barracks has gone down in history and legend for its effects on modern medical care. The scandal she uncovered was that more soldiers were killed by preventable diseases caused by unsanitary healthcare than as a result of battlefield wounds. [3]
Florence Nightingale and her nurses saw soldiers suffering from frostbite, dysentery, cholera and typhus living in ‘utterly chaotic, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions’. ‘There were no blankets, beds, furniture, food, or cooking utensils, but there were rats and fleas everywhere’, historian Eileen Magnello has recounted.
Science Museum Group Collection. [https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/florence-nightingale-pioneer-statistician]
On top of that, the nurses found inadequate medical records. There was no systematic recording or reporting, hundreds of soldiers were buried without a record being made of their deaths, and a bureaucratic inertia prevented nurses and administrators from spotting obvious flaws in the system.
Nightingale began taking private lessons with a Cambridge-trained mathematician at the age of twenty. Statistics became her primary mathematical interest; indeed, she would later call it ‘the most important science in the world’. Yet mathematics was not Nightingale’s only passion: she believed that nursing, the vocation for which she is now best known, was her calling from God. For Nightingale, mathematics and nursing were not mutually exclusive. Rather, the two complemented each other; even as a student she undertook private statistical studies of public health, amassing a personal dossier of data [4].
Nightingale’s polar area diagram
Nightingale used this statistical data to create her Polar Area Diagram, or “coxcombs” as she called them. These were used to give a graphical representation of the mortality figures during the Crimean War (1854–56).
The area of each coloured wedge, measured from the centre as a common point, is in proportion to the statistic it represents. The blue outer wedges represent the deaths from preventable or mitigable zymotic diseases or in other words contagious diseases such as cholera and typhus. The central red wedges show the deaths from wounds. The black wedges in between represent deaths from all other causes. Deaths in the British field hospitals reached a peak during January 1855, when 2,761 soldiers died of contagious diseases, 83 from wounds and 324 from other causes making a total of 3,168. The army’s average manpower for that month was 32,393. Using this information, Nightingale computed a mortality rate of 1,174 per 10,000 with 1,023 per 10,000 being from zymotic diseases. If this rate had continued, and troops had not been replaced frequently, then disease alone would have killed the entire British army in the Crimea.
Her significant contribution
Nightingale’s diagram revolutionary
By 1856, Florence Nightingale had transformed hospital care in the Crimean War — her next step was to use statistics to convince the British army and government of the need for widespread reform.
Today, we are used to seeing statistics presented in graphical form. Infographics are common in newspapers, magazines and online. However, in 1850s Britain, the approach was revolutionary.
While most statisticians provided data in tables of numbers, Nightingale was one of a small group of mathematicians who seized on the power of graphics to describe statistical findings to a non-specialist readership.
With her mortality diagram, Nightingale wanted MPs and army officials to get a quick visual understanding of the scale of the problem, counteracting their entrenched belief that soldiers died from wounds rather than unsanitary hospitals. [3]
[1] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nightingale/
[2] https://www.biography.com/scientists/florence-nightingale
[3] https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/florence-nightingale-pioneer-statistician
[4] Magnello, M E, 2010, ‘The statistical thinking and ideas of Florence Nightingale and Victorian politicians’ in Radical Statistics, Issue 102, pp 17–32