Florence Nightingale
She and her sister studied history, mathematics, Italian, classical literature, and philosophy, and from an early age she, who was the more academic of the two girls, displayed an extraordinary ability for collecting and analysing data which she would use to great effect in later life."
She was a pioneer in statistics; she represented her analysis in graphical forms to ease drawing conclusions and actionables from data. She is famous for usage of the polar area diagram, also called the rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram. This diagram is still regularly used in data
She was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She was also a pioneer in data visualisation with the use of infographics, using graphical presentations of statistical data in an effective way. Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.
In 1838, her father took the family on a tour in Europe where she was introduced to the English-born Parisian hostess Mary Clarke, with whom she bonded. She recorded that "Clarkey" was a stimulating hostess who did not care for her appearance, and while her ideas did not always agree with those of her guests, "she was incapable of boring anyone." Her behaviour was said to be exasperating and eccentric and she had little respect for upper-class British women, whom she regarded generally as inconsequential. She said that if given the choice between being a woman or a galley slave, then she would choose the freedom of the galleys. She generally rejected female company and spent her time with male intellectuals. Clarke made an exception, however, in the case of this family and X in particular. The two were to remain close friends for 40 years despite their 27-year age difference. Clarke demonstrated that women could be equal to men, an idea that she had not learnt from her mother.
Her most persistent suitor was the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, but after a nine-year courtship, she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her need to work.
In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846) who was on his honeymoon. He and X became life long close friends.
She also much later had strong relations with academic Benjamin Jowett, who may have wanted to marry her.[16]
She continued her travels with Charles and Selina Bracebridge as far as Greece and Egypt.
Her writings on Egypt, in particular, are testimony to her learning, literary skill, and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel in January 1850, she wrote of the Abu Simbel temples, "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering ... not a feature is correct — but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man."
From 1857 onwards, she was intermittently bedridden and suffered from depression. A recent biography cites brucellosis and associated spondylitis as the cause. Most authorities today accept that she suffered from a particularly extreme form of brucellosis, the effects of which only began to lift in the early 1880s. Despite her symptoms, she remained phenomenally productive in social reform. During her bedridden years, she also did pioneering work in the field of planning, and her work propagated quickly across Britain and the world. Her output slowed down considerably in her last decade. She wrote very little during that period due to blindness and declining mental abilities, though she still retained an interest in current affairs.
The Royal Sanitary Commission of 1868–1869 presented her with an opportunity to press for compulsory sanitation in private houses. She lobbied the minister responsible, James Stansfeld, to strengthen the proposed Public Health Bill to require owners of existing properties to pay for connection to mains drainage. The strengthened legislation was enacted in the Public Health Acts of 1874 and 1875. At the same time, she combined with the retired sanitary reformer to persuade Stansfeld to devolve powers to enforce the law to Local Authorities, eliminating central control by medical technocrats. Historians now believe that both drainage and devolved enforcement played a crucial role in increasing average national life expectancy by 20 years between 1871 and the mid-1930s during which time medical science made no impact on the most fatal epidemic diseases.
This woman's achievements are all the more impressive when they are considered against the background of social restraints on women in Victorian England. Her father, was an extremely wealthy landowner, and the family moved in the highest circles of English society. In those days, women of her class did not attend universities and did not pursue professional careers; their purpose in life was to marry and bear children. She was fortunate. Her father believed women should be educated, and he personally taught her Italian, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history, and – most unusual of all for women of the time – writing and mathematics.
While better known for her contributions in the scientific and mathematical fields, she is also an important link in the study of English feminism.
She wrote some 200 books, pamphlets and articles throughout her life. During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. This was an 829-page, three-volume work, which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never published in its entirety. An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by Wilfrid Laurier University, as volume of a 16 volume project, the Collected Works of this woman. The best known of these essays, called "Cassandra", was previously published by in 1928. Strachey included it inThe Cause, a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out thoughts; Nightingale left soon after writing this to train at the Institute for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth.
She died aged 90 in 1910.
