Florence Nightingale understood the power of visualizing science
Victorian icon Florence Nightingale is best known as the founder of modern nursing. But Nightingale, who would have celebrated her 200th birthday on May 12, was also a statistics and data visualization pioneer who sought to illustrate that simple sanitation techniques, such as handwashing, could stop the spread of infectious diseases (SN: 1/5/20). While that’s a particularly timely message given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it wasn’t one widely known, or even believed, in the mid-1800s. Nightingale’s best-known diagram is a variation of a pie chart known as a rose, or polar area, chart. In that diagram, she showed that poor sanitation, not battle wounds, lay behind most English soldiers’ deaths during the Crimean War in the 1850s and that such deaths were avoidable, says statistics historian Eileen Magnello of University College London. It “provided unequivocal evidential data that preventable contagious diseases could be eliminated.” To make the graph, Nightingale used data she and medical staff collected while caring for English soldiers in army hospitals and camps. She observed...