This post on Florence Nightingale was written in support of Suw Charman-Anderson’s fantastic Ada Lovelace Day Pledge to ‘publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire‘.
[Florence Nightingale Image Source: ThrillSeeker]
Florence Nightingale & Information Visualisation
While Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is generally remembered for nursing reform and the appealing image of her wandering about hospital wards with a lamp during the Crimean War, she was equally adept at illuminating the appalling hygiene conditions of soldiers in the British Army through statistics. Information visualisation is important to those of us who need to convey complex information and relationships between information sets to others, and Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the field; as a result of her work using statistics to support her arguments for health policy reform, she was the first female elected to membership of what is now the Royal Statistical Society, in 1858.
While Florence Nightingale’s father ensured that she received early private tuition in mathematics, philosophy and languages, this formative education proved to be at odds with the aims of her mother who wished her to marry and settle into a privileged role in society. Consequently, Nightingale spent most of her twenties lobbying her family to be allowed to undertake meaningful work (first asking to be a mathematician, and later a nurse), travelling, studying, and declining suitors. Her views on restrictive Victorian society were expressed in an 1852 essay, Cassandra, which she self-published anonymously as Suggestions for Thought in 1860; with extracts later referenced by her friend, John Stuart Mill, in The Subjection of Women, and subsequently by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. After the years of protest, Nightingale’s family at last gave her permission to enter nursing and she quickly gained a reputation for leadership through her work in establishing a Home for Gentlewomen in Harley Street, London. She was subsequently permitted to lead a group of nurses to Turkey to help improve the well-publicised unsanitary hospital conditions at the Crimean battlefront. Once in Turkey, Nightingale spent two years developing new nursing systems and lobbying for improvements, and gained her international reputation as a ministering angel. It was in the next forty years of her life following her return to Britain as a partial invalid, however, that she proved to be an exceptional statistician and social activist.
Polar Area Diagram (also known as the Nightingale Rose)
While the Florence Nightingale Museum site incorrectly states that Florence Nightingale invented the pie chart, which was developed by William Playfair fifty years earlier, she did create the polar area diagram as part of the >800 page report ‘Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army’ submitted to Queen Victoria in 1858 upon her return from the Crimean War. Following submission of the full report, Nightingale self-published 2,000 booklets containing key extracts (the key text and diagrams which she referred to as the report’s ‘coxcomb’) and forwarded this to government decision-makers to help support her suggestions for improvements to conditions in local hospitals.
The below “Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East” incorporated general UK population mortality data generously provided by William Farr, Compiler of Abstracts in the General Registry Office, for comparison with her own Crimean mortality data. Disregarding Farr’s recommendation to make her statistics as dry as possible, Nightingale instead communicated the data in this vivid visual form. Self-corrections to her earlier ‘bat’s wing’ diagrams led to development of her polar area diagram. In the below final graphic, each segment represents a month (where January starts at the 6-7 o’clock position), blue represents deaths occuring from preventable disease, red represents deaths occuring from wounds, and black represents deaths due to other causes. For a clearer view of the diagram, refer to the excellent visuals at Science News site (though they inaccurately refer to the diagrams as the ‘coxcombs’).
Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East
[Source: 1958 gift to Queen Victoria, The Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II]
Florence Nightingale as Project Manager
Florence Nightingale seems to have been a perserverant, intelligent, logical, pragmatic and stubborn individual. When she set off to the Crimea she bought her own supplies for the hospital en-route, forseeing that the supplies would be in disarray upon arrival despite having been promised that they would be available, her foresight was rewarded as the promised supplies seemed to be in permanent transit. At a later stage, when new hospital supplies were locked away through bureaucratic incompetence, she ordered that a store door be knocked down to enable her patients to receive supplies. While still in Crimea and beset by military bureaucracy questioning her work locally and initiating defamation campaigns in the UK press at home, she enlisted the support of her sponsor, Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War, who arranged for Queen Victoria to write a public commendation of Nightingale’s work, which quietened disapproval and also helped change perception of nursing to that of a respectable occupation. Less appealingly, following the Crimean War, when working to prepare statistical reports, she broke off relations with Sidney Herbert when he suffered a breakown and was unable to help complete the work – after his death she endeavoured to appease her own conscience by self-publishing a testimonial to the worth of his career. Interestingl
y, attempts to sabotage Nightingale’s reputation continue, with Wikipedia edits suggesting she had few friendships with women though correspondence records show otherwise (these will be corrected!), and others reprinting defamatory correspondence which is at odds with other public records and also suggesting she took personal credit for Crimean improvements while failing to note that it was Nightingale who illustrated a direct link between patient survival and improvements in hygiene.
It is true that while having written nursing guidelines (see Notes on Nursing) and having devoted her life to improving nursing conditions, Florence Nightingale was against a formal certification for nurses as she didn’t see how it could be uniformly assessed, it’s also true that Mary Seacole was declined in her request to join Nightingale’s nurses in Crimea for reasons unknown, however Nightingale’s contribution to public health improvements are unquestionable, and with the vast amount of work currently underway in information management in the UK NHS, we can still learn a great deal from Nightingale’s approach to information visualisation that is applicable to development of information tools today, and for that she is a woman ‘in technology’ to be admired.
Information Visualisation
If you too have a fetish for information visualisation, start by taking a look at the exquisite Information Aesthetics blog, and Edward Tufte’s site.
Other Ada Lovelace Day Pledges
For more details on the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, read our previous post about Ada Lovelace Day, visit The Ada Lovelace Day Collection site to read other posts, or better still, visit the pledge site to submit your own post if you haven’t done so already!
The fantastic people at the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology (UKRC4SET) have solicited a pledge response from Ada Lovelace’s great-great-great-niece, Dr Honora Smith, a lecturer in Operational Research and Management Science at the University of Southampton School of Mathematics – read Honora Smith’s post nominating two inspirational colleagues here.
