Florence Nightingale
Abstract
On her death in 1910, Florence Nightingale left a vast collection of reports, letters, notes and other written material. There are numerous publications that make use of this material, often highlighting Florence’s attitude to a particular issue. In this paper we gather a set of quotations and construct a dialogue with Florence Nightingale on the subject of statistics. Our dialogue draws attention to strong points of connection between Florence Nightingale’s use of statistics and modern evidence-based approaches to medicine and public health. We offer our dialogue as a memorable way to draw the attention of students to the key role of data-based evidence in medicine and in the conduct of public affairs.
1. Introduction
1.1 Who Was Florence Nightingale?
Florence Nightingale (1820 - 1910), hereafter referred to as FN, made remarkable use of her ninety years of life. She was the second of two daughters, born in England to wealthy and well-connected parents. There were varied religious influences. Her parents both came from a Unitarian religious tradition that emphasized “deeds, not creeds”. The family associated with the Church of England (Baly 1997b) when property that FN's father had inherited brought with it parochial duties. A further religious influence was her friendship with the Irish Sister Mary Clare Moore, the founding superior of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London. Her father supervised and took the major responsibility for his daughters’ education, which included classical and modern languages, history, and philosophy. When she was 20 he arranged, at FN’s insistence, tutoring in mathematics. These and other influences inculcated a strong sense of public duty, independence of mind, a fierce intellectual honesty, a radical and unconventional religious mysticism from which she found succour in her varied endeavours, and an unforgiving attitude both toward her own faults and toward those of others.
At the age of 32,
On her death in 1910, Florence Nightingale left a vast collection of reports, letters, notes and other written material. There are numerous publications that make use of this material, often highlighting Florence’s attitude to a particular issue. In this paper we gather a set of quotations and construct a dialogue with Florence Nightingale on the subject of statistics. Our dialogue draws attention to strong points of connection between Florence Nightingale’s use of statistics and modern evidence-based approaches to medicine and public health. We offer our dialogue as a memorable way to draw the attention of students to the key role of data-based evidence in medicine and in the conduct of public affairs.
1. Introduction
1.1 Who Was Florence Nightingale?
Florence Nightingale (1820 - 1910), hereafter referred to as FN, made remarkable use of her ninety years of life. She was the second of two daughters, born in England to wealthy and well-connected parents. There were varied religious influences. Her parents both came from a Unitarian religious tradition that emphasized “deeds, not creeds”. The family associated with the Church of England (Baly 1997b) when property that FN's father had inherited brought with it parochial duties. A further religious influence was her friendship with the Irish Sister Mary Clare Moore, the founding superior of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London. Her father supervised and took the major responsibility for his daughters’ education, which included classical and modern languages, history, and philosophy. When she was 20 he arranged, at FN’s insistence, tutoring in mathematics. These and other influences inculcated a strong sense of public duty, independence of mind, a fierce intellectual honesty, a radical and unconventional religious mysticism from which she found succour in her varied endeavours, and an unforgiving attitude both toward her own faults and toward those of others.
At the age of 32,