The Scientific Vision of Women

Florence Nightingale is well known for her work to revolutionize sanitation conditions in military hospitals during the Crimean War. What may be less well known is Nightingale’s passion for statistics and talent for data visualization. She is not only credited with popularizing an unusual chart type, the “rose” or “coxcomb” chart, but she also went to great trouble to publish and popularize her visualizations to effect social change. As a result of her efforts, the British military adopted new sanitation standards, and Nightingale Schools for Nurses trained new generations to maintain those standards.

The radar chart seen here on the left is an early version of her famous rose chart. The distance of the line from the center of the circle shows increases and decreases in mortality over time. As Nightingale refined her message, however, she realized the original diagram was a bit misleading because the shaded area is not meaningful. In her later version (right) it is the area of the colored wedge that represents the data point. While the blue wedge for January 1955 is still the largest wedge, it doesn’t look as exaggerated as the blue “tail of a portentous comet” of the original chart.

Label by Angela Zoss