Florence Nightingale's ther Skills
To have the kind of long-term influence on public health policy that she did, Florence Nightingale must have had skills beyond being a nurse. And yet, I never thought of those other capabilities until I read Tim Harford’s article . Eloquence was one such attribute. When she landed in the Crimean warfront in 1854, here’s how she described the situation: “This is the Kingdom of Hell.” Equally important, she was a statistician. The first female fellow of what became the Royal Statistical Society, in fact. As Harford puts it: “For Nightingale… the data were not just a passion but a weapon (to influence policy).” She understood that presentation mattered. That a picture conveys a lot more than dry numbers. It is therefore unsurprising that she once wrote to a friend: “Whenever I am infuriated, I revenge myself with a new diagram.” Returning home after the war, she led a long campaign to improve public standards of health and sanitation. On the plus side, she h...