A celebration of a passionate statistician
The Florence Nightingale museum
Ambulances working for St Thomas Hospital drive to and fro past the entrance to the museum which celebrates the life and work of Florence Nightingale who founded the first school of nursing at this hospital in 1860. Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the use of statistics for evidence based practice and planning.
Statistician
Florence Nightingale used statistics to understand the causes of deaths in the Crimean War. After the war she turned her attention to the peace-time army and found that soldiers aged 20 to 35 were twice as likely to die as civilians. She used her evidence to press the case for reform and went on to study the health of the army in India.
She was committed to the idea that social phenomena could be measured and analysed mathematically. She was an innovator. She developed new ways to collect, tabulate, interpret, and display descriptive statistical data.
Florence Nightingale argued that statistics is: "...the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience."
In 1860 Florence Nightingale became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Statistical Society for her contribution to Army statistics and comparative hospital statistics.
Submitted by: Andrew Hunt, 18 January 2007
