Florence Nightingale, born 1820, was a statistics pioneer

Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 in Florence, Italy, to a wealthy British family travelling abroad, and was named after the city. She became the founder of modern nursing and one of the first people to use statistics to change public health policy.

In 1854 she took a team of nurses to the British military hospital at Scutari, near Constantinople, during the Crimean War. The war killed 22.7% of British troops sent, and 30.9% of French troops, mostly from preventable disease rather than wounds. For comparison, 2.3% of U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War.

Did Florence Nightingale save lives or cost them?

Popular accounts say her nursing cut Scutari’s death rate from 40% to 2%, though figures vary by source; one medical review says she reduced mortality to 10%.

Some modern historians went further the other way, claiming her hospital had among the war’s worst death rates and that she later broke down from guilt. Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald has rebutted this with comparative data: after sanitary reforms began in March 1855, the British death rate fell in the second winter to about a tenth of the first, while the French rate nearly doubled.

How did Nightingale use statistics?

She turned the death counts into charts. Back in London she worked with William Farr, the leading medical statistician of the day, on polar-area charts that split the deaths at March 1855, labelled “commencement of sanitary improvements”. In 1858 she became the first female member of what is now the Royal Statistical Society; Farr signed her nomination form.

She published Notes on Nursing in 1859 and founded a nurses’ training school at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1860. Since 1965 her birthday has been marked as International Nurses Day.