Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 - 13 August 1910) was a British pioneer of modern nursing and statistician. She gained fame for her work during the Crimean War, where she drastically improved sanitary conditions in field hospitals, significantly reducing mortality. Beyond her nursing efforts, Nightingale made major scientific contributions by applying statistical methods to health data, creating visual tools like the polar area diagram to present mortality statistics and advocate for sanitary reforms. Her work laid the foundation for professional nursing and modern epidemiology.

Quotes

• I attribute my success to this — I never gave or took an excuse.
• You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
• Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.
• To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.
• How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
• It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor.
• Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.
• The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
• Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.