Victorian statistical graphics and the iconography of Florence Nightingale's polar area graph

Abstract

The popular iconic image of Florence Nightingale as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’, who administered acute nursing care to the casualties during the Crimean War, belies a more integrated approach to Nightingale's nursing, which was shaped by her use of evidence-based medicine, promulgated in her statistical reports, books and papers. This image thus undermines Nightingale's prodigious statistical work and her innovative statistical graphs that led to major health reforms in military and civilian hospitals, usually with the full support of the government. It was this empirically based strategy that enabled her to establish the necessary and essential nursing and hospital reforms, which modernized nursing in the mid- to late-Victorian period. This paper will examine the mathematical and statistical graphs that arose in the nineteenth century, which influenced Nightingale's use of statistical graphs. The iconography of her polar area graph, which was based on the mortality rates of British soldiers during the Crimean War, will also be assessed. It will be shown that Nightingale's role in promoting this graph helped to establish its iconic status, as did her introduction of new elements into the ordinary polar area graph.