This resolution was backed by four subcommissions focused on sanitary construction, health codes, a military medical school and military statistics. Within months after the first batch was published, the issue of overcrowded barracks was debated in both houses of Parliament, which moved to reform the sanitary conditions of the army. Nightingale's diagrams received broad coverage in the press. Her graphics made it impossible to deny the realities represented by the data: army administration needed dramatic reform. She showed how, for example, peacetime soldiers living in army barracks died at higher rates than civilian men of similar ages. For instance, Nightingale brilliantly framed army mortality by contrasting it with civilian mortality. She constructed her arguments from easy-to-understand comparisons. Nightingale's stories showcased how poor sanitation and overcrowding caused unnecessary death. It was more than data visualization-it was data storytelling. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. We can now appreciate better than ever what an innovator Nightingale was and how her techniques foreshadowed how data graphics would become essential to public understanding and debate today. I studied correspondence that details Nightingale's information-design process, hand-drawn draft diagrams never before seen by the public and a complete catalog of her information graphics. I recently conducted the first in-depth study of how Nightingale created and used data visualization, and I share my research in the forthcoming book Florence Nightingale, Mortality and Health Diagrams (Visionary Press).
Nightingale's key persuasion tactic was to convey statistics in exciting ways. The team focused its campaign on promoting sanitary reform: fresh air, clean sewers and less crowding. She did not do it alone-a circle of experts, including statesmen, statisticians and scientists, united with her to break the policy makers' inertia and ineptitude. She worked 20-hour days, mostly behind the scenes, writing letters, wrangling data and publishing anonymously. With public attention drifting away from the concluded war, Nightingale knew that the opportunity for reform was fleeting. Her prime target throughout this effort was the head of the British Army, Queen Victoria. Nightingale, with her quantitative mind, had to persuade people with common understanding but uncommon standing. Their poor data literacy muted statistical arguments that could have oriented them toward the facts. Resolute, Nightingale set out to sway the minds of generals, medical officers and parliamentarians. At around this same time, she began working with data and charts. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE was photographed in London a few months after returning home from war. Patient outcomes varied depending on whether you asked the officer who lost fighters, the ferryman who shuttled the sick, the doctor who treated invalids or the adjutant who buried bodies.
And the poor quality of army data made it impossible to know exactly how soldiers died. They wrongly believed, for example, that communicable diseases were caused by unavoidable realities-the weather, bad diet and harsh work conditions.
Many government leaders accepted the loss of common soldiers as inevitable. Nightingale arrived back in London determined to prevent similar suffering from happening again. The causes of the soldiers' torment were numerous: incompetent officers, meager supplies, inadequate shelters, overcrowded hospitals and cruel medical practices. She was serving in the Crimean War, where Britain fought alongside France against the Russian invasion of the Ottoman Empire. Nightingale had earned the moniker “Lady with the Lamp” by making night rounds on patients, illuminated by a paper lantern. The “horrors of war,” Nightingale realized, were inflicted by more than enemy bullets. An entire fighting force had been effectively lost to disease and infection. As the nursing administrator of a sprawling British Army hospital network, she had witnessed thousands of sick soldiers endure agony in filthy wards. In the summer of 1856 Florence Nightingale sailed home from war furious.
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