Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born in Florence on 12 May 1820, the younger daughter of William and Frances Nightingale, a wealthy English couple then on an extended European tour. She grew up between the family's two houses — Embley Park in Hampshire and Lea Hurst in Derbyshire — and was given an unusually rigorous education by her father, including mathematics, Greek, Latin, history and philosophy.

In 1837, aged 16, she recorded what she described as a call from God to serve others. Nursing at the time was not a respectable profession for a woman of her class; hospital nurses were largely untrained and the work carried a poor reputation. Her family resisted for years. She eventually trained at the Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany in 1851, and in 1853 took an unpaid post running the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen on Upper Harley Street in London.

Reports in The Times about the neglect of wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War caused public outrage in 1854. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War and a personal friend, asked Nightingale to lead a party of nurses to the military hospitals at Scutari, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. She arrived in November 1854 with 38 volunteers.

The Barrack Hospital was overcrowded and filthy. Its water supply was contaminated, its sewers were blocked, and there was almost no ventilation, bedding, soap or basic equipment. Nightingale organised supplies, laundry, food and record-keeping, and made night rounds carrying a lamp — the detail that gave her the popular name "the Lady with the Lamp", first reported in The Times and later fixed in the public imagination by Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena".

Nightingale's own account of what happened next is more honest than the legend. Death rates at Scutari stayed catastrophically high through the winter of 1854–55 and only fell after a government Sanitary Commission arrived in March 1855 and flushed the sewers and improved ventilation. Studying the figures afterwards, she concluded that the hospital's own insanitary conditions had killed far more men than their wounds had. That conclusion, not the lamp, shaped the rest of her life's work.

Back in England, Nightingale turned to data. Working with the statistician William Farr, she analysed mortality in the British Army and presented the results in her 1858 report on the health and administration of the army — a document dense with tables and charts aimed squarely at ministers and generals who would never read a statistical paper.

Her best-known device is the polar area diagram, a circular chart in which each wedge's area represents deaths in a given month, shaded to separate deaths from preventable disease, from wounds, and from other causes. The visual argument was impossible to miss: the preventable-disease wedges dwarfed the rest. It is one of the earliest examples of data visualisation used deliberately to change government policy.

In 1859 she became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society, and she was later made an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

In 1859 Nightingale published Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, a short and famously blunt book written for ordinary readers as much as for nurses. Its themes — fresh air, clean water, light, warmth, diet and careful observation of the patient — followed directly from what she had seen at Scutari.

The Nightingale Fund, raised by public subscription in recognition of her Crimean work, paid for the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, which opened at St Thomas' Hospital in London in 1860. It established nursing as a trained, salaried and respectable profession with its own standards, and its graduates carried the model to hospitals across Britain and abroad.

From around 1857 Nightingale was largely confined to her home by chronic illness, often attributed to an infection contracted in Crimea. She nevertheless spent the next fifty years writing reports, briefing officials and corresponding relentlessly on hospital design, army health and sanitary reform in India. She died in her sleep in London on 13 August 1910, aged 90.