Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 into a wealthy British family -she was named after the Italian city where she was born. From a young age she felt a calling to serve, and at sixteen she believed she had heard the voice of God directing her to do his work. Despite fierce opposition from her family, who considered nursing beneath her social station, she obtained training in Germany and eventually became superintendent of a London hospital.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, Nightingale led a team of nurses to the British military hospital at Scutari (modern Istanbul). The conditions were appalling: soldiers were dying in far greater numbers from infections, dysentery, and cholera than from battle wounds. Through relentless lobbying, Nightingale secured improved sanitation, ventilation, and supplies, and the death rate in the hospital plummeted from over 40% to around 2%.

Nightingale was one of the pioneers of statistical graphics, creating innovative 'polar area diagrams' (now known as Nightingale rose diagrams) to visualize mortality data and persuade government officials of the importance of sanitary conditions. She is considered a founder of modern nursing, evidence-based medicine, and data visualization.

After returning from the Crimea, ill health confined Nightingale largely to her room for decades -though she remained enormously productive, writing over 200 books and pamphlets and advising on the design of hospitals worldwide. She established the first secular nursing school in the world at St Thomas' Hospital in London. She died in 1910 at the age of 90, having transformed the profession of nursing and the science of public health.