We live in an age of dwindling attention spans. The rise of Instagram and the clickbaity nature of the links that we encounter each day is proof of this. The advice given to every aspiring writer is to catch the readers attention before they wander away and to cleverly deploy images to mold their opinions.
Florence Nightingale intuitively grasped this idea 170 years ago. While I knew her as the founder of modern nursing, I had no clue about her trailblazing contributions to the field of statistics and data-visualization.
As a child, she diligently categorized and graphed her gardening exploits. She rubbed shoulders with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the pioneers of computing and corresponded with Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian statistician known for creating the Body Mass Index and conceptualizing Averages and Means for describing group characteristics.
So, it’s little wonder that Nightingale ended up utilizing her statistical skills in Istanbul where she was deployed to care for the wounded of the Crimean War. To drive home the point that improved sanitary conditions in the hospitals reduced mortality rates, she created a Rose Diagram. Its impact in shaping 19th century public opinion by drawing the reader’s attention to the numbers visually was tremendous. The fun fact is that her choice of the diagram over-emphasized the impact of the outcomes. This manipulation of data by her is today credited with raising British life expectancy by twenty years and saving millions of lives.
She became the first woman to be inducted into the Royal Statistical Society, the first non-royal to be on the British banknote and the most popular Brit of that era after, of course, Queen Victoria.
(For a more detailed discussion of her statistical work and collaboration with William Farr – the founder of medical statistics, check out Tim Harford’s ‘How to Make the World Add Up‘)
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