Florence Nightingale, Data Scientist
Florence Nightingale is well-known as the founder of modern nursing. She was also a statistician. Nightingale has been called The Godmother of Infographics. One of her designs is a pie chart for time-travel. It’s now known as a Coxcomb Chart; the name comes from its resemblance to a rose or cockscomb, a garden plant.
Nightingale created this Coxcomb to tell a story about the relationship between deaths from complications and during battle. You read it like a clock. Below, at right, 12 o’clock is April 1854. Nightingale was serving in the Crimea War.
Time marches on clockwise. Deaths from post-battle disease (“Zymotic diseases”) are shown in blue; deaths during battle are in pink and black. The dominant blue ink tells her story: more soldiers died from preventable causes than from the battle itself.
Great data science tells a story. The greatest of all time change minds. This chart helped change policy and save lives.
The work of the Florence Nightingale Museum inspired this post. Click on the chart to inspect it in detail. If you’re wondering what “Zymotic disease” is, so was I. Zymotic disease was a 19th-century medical term for acute infectious diseases, “especially chief fevers and contagious diseases (e.g. typhus and typhoid fevers, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, erysipelas, cholera, whooping-cough, diphtheria, etc.)” Nightingale referred to these as “avoidable deaths.”
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Why not help Nightingale’s legacy live on?
In 2021, we’ll hold a series of hackathons to extend Spotfire with innovative visualizations. The Coxcomb is a great candidate. To learn more, here's an article about the Mods Mission and low-code analytics applications. Here are more details about the Coxcomb and an implementation from Visually.
Or, consider helping the Florence Nightingale Museum with a donation. Like many museums, they’ve been hit hard by the pandemic and need help.
And, if you contribute a Nightingale-inspired Mod, let me know on LinkedIn. Help keep the legacy of the Godmother of Infographics alive!
