Meet Florence Nightingale: The Statistician With a Lamp

Scutari

She arrived at the British military hospital at Scutari in 1854 with thirty-eight nurses. What she found was not primarily a shortage of medicine: it was an overwhelmed building over a defective sewer, with contaminated water, no ventilation and men dying in their own filth. Far more soldiers were dying of typhus, cholera and dysentery than of their wounds.

The diagram

Back in Britain she did the thing that actually changed policy: she counted. Working with the statistician William Farr, she built the figures into a polar area diagram — a circular chart where the area of each wedge shows the deaths in a month, split by cause, so the vast blue expanse of preventable disease dwarfs the red of battle wounds.

She designed it because she knew ministers would not read a table. It is one of the earliest uses of a graphic specifically to persuade a decision-maker, and it worked.

Nursing as a trained profession

Notes on Nursing (1859) was written for ordinary women caring for the sick at home, and it is startlingly practical: air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, diet, and above all observation. In 1860 she founded a training school at St Thomas' Hospital, turning nursing from a job into a profession with a curriculum.

She was elected the first female fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when you know something is wrong but cannot get anyone to act. She will ask what you have measured, and how you plan to make the person with the power actually look at it.