Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) became a pioneering statistician in the course of her work as the founder of modern nursing in Europe and her efforts to spread medical knowledge among the British masses.
Nightingale developed a lifelong commitment to social justice from girlhood in spite of her upbringing in a wealthy landowning family. Her maternal grandfather was an abolitionist and her father was unusual for his time in providing a thorough education to Florence and her sister, including mathematics . An influential older friend was the feminist Mary Clarke.
Florence Nightingale is often presented in gender-stereotypical terms as a Victorian "angel of mercy" or as the "Lady with the Lamp." However, she worked as a nurse only briefly, during the Crimean War, and nursing theory and institutions were only part of her life work.
Nightingale was primarily a social reformer. She embraced the new "social science" of the Belgian mathematician and theorist Adolphe Quetelet, who argued that social problems an be quantified and analyzed mathematically. Historian of statistics Roy Porter calls her "perhaps the most enthusiastic statistician of all." Nightingale created new types of infographics to help people visualize the quantitative data that would help them understand fundamental concepts. One is called a "Nightingale Rose Diagram" or a "polar area diagram" such as this one, in which she displayed causes of death in a British army hospital during the Crimean War:
The importance of Nightingale's statistical work was recognized with her election as the first woman invited to join the Royal Statistical Society. Later she was made an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
In spite of the income settled on Nightingale by her father, her work relied on the British government as its empire extended into India. Asked to study the causes of illness among the British Army there, she concluded from her statistical study that soldiers' health went hand-in-hand with improvements in sanitary conditions for the Indian population. Later she joined with other reformers to press for enforcement of sanitary regulations in England.
Nightingale's essay "Cassandra" (1852) struggled against contemporary infantilizing stereotypes of women. She defied expectations that a woman of her class would make a "good marriage," remaining single throughout her life. Feminist historians and queer historians claim her as part of their legacy.
As students of statistics, we claim her too!
