![]() ![]() She led a remarkable life and her experiences reinforced a view that William Playfair had become fixed on a century before: that research which is easy to understand and non-technical has a greater likelihood of effectively influencing policy, and that if those are your aims a good chart will help.In 1858 nurse, statistician, and reformer Florence Nightingale published Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. She continued her research and campaigning on sanitary conditions in India and the UK. ![]() Her findings had a direct impact on improvements in military hospitals. Nightingale sent her chart to the War Office, as part of a report that could be understood by civil servants and Members of Parliament alike. The chart clearly shows the number of avoidable deaths in a given month during the war. They were divided into three categories: "Preventible or Mitigable Zymotic Diseases" (we would later simply call these ‘infections’, coloured in blue), "wounds" (red) and "all other causes" (black). A collection of ‘coxcombs’ were used to depict the causes of death during the Crimean war. By adapting Playfair’s pie chart a new visualisation was born: the polar area chart. Her solution was to invent a new kind of chart. The pair were instrumental in establishing a Royal Commission to investigate sanitary conditions during the war.īut with all this data flying around in masses of tables, Nightingale knew that her findings could easily lose their impact. Nightingale’s data showed the magnitude of neglect in the barracks and she found that even in peacetime a soldier faced twice the risk of dying when compared to a civilian. When she met William Farr at a dinner party they compared notes: he worked as the official ‘Compiler of Abstracts’ in the General Registry Office, and was tasked with constructing a ‘mortality table’ of the general population. ![]() In Crimea, she had taken it upon herself to keep a record of all patient admissions and causes of death. Nightingale’s greatest achievements occurred on her return to Britain. Her team worked tirelessly to improve the sanitation of hospitals in Scutari and even influenced the government to establish a new hospital. The war is infamous for its harrowing death rates: for the British Army 23% of the troops sent lost their lives, for the French it was 31%. In 1854, she took a small group of nurses to Scutari, part of modern-day Istanbul, where they cared for wounded soldiers, perhaps naïve to the magnitude of misery and pain they would encounter. The Crimean war was a call to action for Nightingale. She continued to learn, and pursued radical subject areas that were looked down upon by the upper classes. She never married rejecting a nine-year long courtship in the worry that a formal union would distract her from pursuing her work. She broke the norm for women of the day not just by rejecting the role of wife, but also refusing to rest content with a simple education. She was educated by her father William Edward Nightingale –- a notable English Unitarian – in mathematics, history, Latin and philosophy. Born in 1820 and raised in Embley Park, Hampshire, Florence Nightingale grew up in an affluent family. ![]()
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