Florence Nightingale

Trained Against Her Family's Wishes

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 into a wealthy family that expected her to marry; she refused for years to do it. She trained in nursing over their objections and in 1854 took thirty-eight nurses to the same barrack hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War, where the press made her famous as the "Lady with the Lamp" — an image built on her night rounds of the wards, checking on the wounded by lamplight. What she brought back to England was arithmetic. Working with the statistician William Farr she showed that the great majority of the army's dead had been killed not by the enemy but by preventable disease, and she invented ways of drawing the data — pie-chart-style wheels called polar-area diagrams, or "rose" diagrams — precisely because ministers would not read a table. In 1858 she became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society. She then spent roughly fifty years bedridden, probably from an infection caught in Crimea, and from that bed rebuilt British army medicine, the sanitary administration of India, and nursing as a paid profession.

Refused a State Funeral

She died in her sleep on 13 August 1910, aged ninety, in London. She had refused a state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey and left instructions that no more than two lines go on the family grave; the stone reads only her initials and her dates. She had spent half a century avoiding the fame the lamp had given her, on the grounds that it was attached to the wrong achievement.