How Did Florence Nightingale Influence The World

Florence Nightingale was someone who left behind an influential legacy in several ways. She is most commonly known for being the founder of modern nursing, and her compassion for helping those in need gained her the name "Lady with the Lamp" during the Crimean war. However, what many do not know is she was also an established statistician and her mathematical findings have had an astounding influence on the world, even to this date. Nightingale introduced a way of organizing mortality rates by cause of death by utilizing statistics and various graphs that had formerly not been used in the world of medicine. Florence Nightingale was an astounding and accomplished woman of her time, and her heroic and logic based actions have greatly benefited not only the health care field, but also the world of statistics.

Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy, to a wealthy English family ("Life of Florence Nightingale"). Her social status allowed her access to private education, where she became fluent in numerous languages such as French and German, while also gaining knowledge in arithmetic. Since her youth, she was highly fond of mathematics, particularly graphs and means of organizing data

Once Nightingale began requiring staff to record instances of specific diseases and how rampant disease had been spreading throughout the hospital, it gained the attention of everyone. It became very much evident that the hospitals were the leading cause of mortalities, not the battlefield. Records of such is what got more federal regulations and funding towards sanitation. Nightingale took the statistics she and her coworkers had gathered and presented them to the Royal Court, demanding that changes be enforced (Magnello, 28). This event in history lead to statistics and data gathering to be enforced in the world of medicine