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Florence Nightingale, Statistical Graphics Pioneer
Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightingale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightingale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers' lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. "As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change."
For Christ's sake, spell her name right.
My web domain.
So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts.
So, in other words, she invented PowerPoint.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I searched around for a more readable graph and found one here, at the bottom of the page.
So if it wasn't for Ms. Nightingale, I would never have understood the deleterious effect my cat was having on my homework performance, as it might never have been properly explained.
If she'd been a man presenting this, she'd have made the equivalent of surgeon general in her career. -_- No joke--Despite the blessing of Queen Victoria herself, she was denied a chairman position that oversaw general health affairs in the military. I doubt there's an academic statistics book currently in circulation that gives her any credit for this. Even this--a zine read by only a tiny, tiny fraction of the people who go to school every year and rely on her innovation. Hell, the entire field of field medicine was in disrepute at that time in history -- who needs medicine? Most nurses spent at least part of their time in the kitchen, which was viewed as more important. She made it important. It's been two centuries since then and she's still only a footnote. Today, graphical statistics are used in every trained discipline from engineering to medicine to management, but nobody knows this woman's name. They should -- they owe her a lot.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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Nightingale didn't get the credit she deserved, but I don't think that credit is really what matters here. Yes, she did it, but shouldn't we look at the results rather than the person who caused them? I do not know much about Nightingale, but most people who choose to work in the medical field back then did it out of selflessness. You didn't become a doctor because you wanted glory, you became a doctor because you wanted to help people.
History is full of women who's contributions have been forgotten. Another one is Lucy Parsons. Her and her husband were anarchist labour leaders in Chicago where they helped organize the events known as the Haymarket Riots which gave the rest of the world May Day.
The Chicago police called her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" and she was a major influence on labor politics until she died in a house fire in 1942 that also consumed most of her many writings.
In 1905 she wrote this piece for The Liberator, published October 22:
FAMOUS WOMEN OF HISTORY: Florence Nightingale
Amid the general consternation, the minister of war wrote a letter to Miss Nightingale, stating that he considered her the only person in Great Britain capable of bringing order out of confusion, and imploring her to organize and direct the reform of the military hospitals; and this letter was crossed by one from Miss Nightingale, volunteering to place her strength and ability at the service of her nation. Good trained nurses were almost unknown quantities in those days; yet, nothing daunted, Florence Nightingale sailed from England with thirty of the best nurses that she could muster within the week from her letter. In required a good deal of tact to overcome the prejudices and jealousies among the physicians and surgeons at the "womanly prominence" and the conciliate the general disapproval of medical and military officials. For these were the days when it was considered that "the proper place for the woman is at home."
Overcoming professional jealousy, she set herself to the task of cleansing the Augean hospitals containing over 4,000 patients. These barrack hospitals at Scutari, which had been loaned to the British government by the Sultan of Turkey, were 100 feet above the Bosporus. The day before the arrival of the staff of nurses the wounded from Balaclava had been landed; packed in the overcrowded transports, their wounds had not been dressed for five days, and cholera and fever were reaping their fearful harvest. The poor men outside with cold and starvation were faring far better than the sufferers in the tainted wards of the disordered hospitals.
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I got this out of "Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity".
Off the top of my head, some other woman who have been mostly forgotten include Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (a co-founder of the ACLU), Ada Lovelace (perhaps earliest programmer), Hedy Lamarr (co-invented spread spectrum wireless communications years before it was technologically practical to implement, but better known for being a babe). How many people here know the name Rosalind Franklin? All of these women and many more excelled in male dominated fields.
Not to take away from Nightingale's achievements, but the most groundbreaking and impactful innovation in graphical representation of disease vectors came from Dr. John Snow, who created a map of SoHo's (London) devastating 1854 cholera outbreak that convincingly made the case that cholera was water born and not the result of miasma. The medical establishment at the time largely dismissed Snow's findings, but the power of the graphical representation convinced the people it needed to in the end and Snow's theories were ultimately vindictated. Unfortunately, Snow didn't live long enough to see his ultimate triumph. Some speculate that his habit of experiementing on himself with ether and chlorophorm may have contributed to his early demise. (Snow was also a pioneering anathesiologist, and even assisted in the birth of Queen Victoria's eight and rather difficult childbirth.) All this is recounted in Steven Johnson's excellent book The Ghost Map (2006). He talks about Nightingale as well, though not about her charts and graphs. Nightingale was, at least through the 1850s a proponent of the eventually discreted miasma theory.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."