Florence Nightingale was born #OTD in 1820.
Though best known as a nurse (maybe a reductive and gendered way of siloing her contributions) she did pioneering work applying statistics to public health and communicating her results with innovative data visualization.
Image: National Archives (UK)
Among Nightingale’s innovations: the Polar-Area Diagrams that she used to represent the impact of poor sanitation and transmissible diseases on the mortality rate of British soldiers during the Crimean War.
This diagram was part of her "Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army" submitted to Queen Victoria in 1858. You can see a copy here: https://archive.org/details/b20387118/page/n7/mode/2up
Image: F. Nightingale
