Nobody Remembers Florence Nightengale

Nobody Remembers

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear” Florence Nightengale

Everybody was watching the  retiring Pope today, hoping into his helicopter, and tweeting the millions below him goodbye. His legacy is evidently, not a good one, but then again, the Catholic Church has been full of corruption almost since its beginning. (That’s what happens when you put one god at the top.)

But—while the Pope leaves visions of just a nice old guy going to rest in some nice garden somewhere, I couldn’t help thinking–what don’t we know about him? After all, I found out something today that I never knew about Florence Nightingale.

From “The Lady Tasting Tea”

Florence Nightingale a legendary English Victorian figure was a terror to the members of Parliament and the British army generals whom she confronted. There is a tendency to think of her simply as the founder of the nursing profession, a gentle, self-sacrificing giver of mercy. But the real Florence Nightingale was a woman with missions. She was also a self-educated statistician.  One of Nightingale’s missions was to force the British army to maintain filed hospitals and supply nursing and medical care to soldiers in the field. To support her position, she plowed though piles of data from the army files. Then she appeared before a royal commission with a remarkable series of graphs. In them she showed how most of the deaths in the British army during the Crimean War were due to illnesses contracted outside the field of battle or that occurred long after action as a result of wounds suffered in battle but left unattended. She invented the pie chart as a means of displaying her message. When she tired of fighting the obtuse seemingly ignorant army generals she would retreat to the village of Evington.

So, think about that next time you see a pie chart.

Who knew? Not me.

There has always been a belief that men are better at math than women. According to this book, (The Lady Tasting Tea- How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg) women have always played a very strong role in statistical sciences.

The Statistical Laboratory and Department of Statistics at Ames, Iowa became one of the most important centers of statistical research in the world. Lots of stuff was delegated to woman, women could be more docile and patient so went the belief and could be depended upon more than men to check and recheck the accuracy of their calculations. A typical picture of the Galton Biometrical Laboratory under Karl Pearson would have Pearson and several men walking around looking at output from the computers or discussing deep mathematical ideas, while all about them rows of women were computing.

So today, Nobody Remembers Florence Nightingale, and the women who did the computing. We need MORE ladies getting into math and less into Beyoncé, don’t you think?

February 28, 2013 Posted by Joyanna Adams | women | computers, History, math, women | 8 Comments