From the archive · Evidence people can see · Issue 00
The diagram that argued
Florence Nightingale’s chart made one fact impossible to ignore: most soldiers were dying of disease, not wounds.
London, 1858
Florence Nightingale is remembered as the lady with the lamp. She deserves to be remembered just as much as a statistician.
After the Crimean War she worked with the statistician William Farr on the army’s own records. The pattern was stark. Far more soldiers had died of preventable diseases such as cholera and dysentery than of battle wounds, and compared with civilians, soldiers were about twice as likely to die of disease, even in peacetime.
Tables alone would not move politicians, so she drew the numbers. Her 1858 “rose” diagrams showed each month’s deaths as a wedge, with the blue of preventable disease swamping everything else.
The same year she became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society. Her evidence supported a Royal Commission on the health of the army and years of sanitary reform.
She did not just count the dead. She made the count impossible to look away from.
Evidence Passport
- What changed
- Army mortality data presented visually to decision-makers, month by month and cause by cause.
- What was measured
- Deaths in the army in the East, by cause, from 1854, compared with civilian death rates.
- Result
- Preventable disease shown as the leading cause of death; a Royal Commission and sanitary reform followed.
- Limits
- The effect of persuasion is hard to measure, and the reforms had many champions besides her.
Sources
- Lady with the diagram (Eye Magazine)
- Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East, 1858 (Wikimedia Commons)
An editorial feature about published work. The people named did not apply to Evinca, were not reviewed by us, and are not Evinca honorees.