Florence’s Lamp — Data Village · Data Stories
Florence Nightingale was a nurse and also a brilliant chart maker. Interactive Data Stories on MyLeoNes: real open data, animated.
Florence Nightingale was a nurse and also a brilliant chart maker. She used numbers to save lives.
The Story
In 1854, during the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale worked at a military hospital in Scutari, in Turkey. She saw that many more soldiers died from diseases you could prevent by being clean, than from battle wounds.
Florence carefully recorded everything, and in 1858 she published rose-shaped charts that made this very clear. The charts helped convince the British government to clean up the hospitals. That year she became the first woman to join the Royal Statistical Society.
Key Ideas
- Record: Write down exactly what happens every day, always in the same way. Without records there’s no data.
- Cause: The reason something happens. Florence wanted to know what the soldiers were dying from.
- Rose chart: A round chart, in slices, which Florence used to show deaths each month.
- Persuade: A good chart helps important people see what’s wrong quickly and change the rules.
Step by Step
- Spot a problem.
- Record the numbers every day.
- Sort the numbers by cause.
- Draw a simple chart.
- Show your chart to someone who can change things.
Try it Yourself
Count how many times a day you wash your hands for a week. Make a bar chart for each of the seven days.
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