Name: What would Florence Nightingale make of big data? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-08-05T19:20:12.000Z
Duration: 4 min 18 s
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Modal verbs - B1

like Marie Curie on Wikileaks, or Charles Dickens on twerking.

We know her as a nurse, the lady with the lamp,

gliding through blood-soaked army hospitals.

But maybe we should call her the lady with the bar chart,

She said she found them "more enlivening than a novel".

And a friend said, "However exhausted Florence might be,

the sight of long columns of figures was perfectly reviving to her."

For Florence, statistics were God's work.

we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose."

So, although she's famous now as a nurse,

she actually trained first as a statistician.

It wasn't until the beginning of the 1840s -

and saw hunger and unemployment all around her -

She'd combined her nursing and statistics

to become an experienced hospital manager,

At the time, nurses were seen as ignorant and lower class.

Florence volunteered to lead a team of nurses in the war.

Before she arrived, the military hospitals didn't even bother

Florence collected data about everything,

so she could show that changes in diet and sanitation

had brought the hospital's death rate down from 42% to just 2%.

It's only when you gather data methodically that patterns emerge.

Things that were hidden suddenly become clear.

That might sound obvious now, but it wasn't back then.

and laid the groundwork for things we now take for granted -

like being able to compare hospitals' performance,

or just the fact that hospitals are clean.

Florence showed what could be achieved by following the evidence,

instead of gut instinct, prejudice or tradition.

Another little-known side of Florence is her talent for infographics.

making it impossible for MPs and civil servants to ignore.

So, she would love the data journalism we have today.

She would love the way big data makes all this possible.

But she'd hate some of the ways that data are abused.

to make their performance indicators look better.

So, when you hear of hospitals fiddling operation waiting times,

And I think she'd be appalled at using data to target adverts

Although largely confined to her room for over half a century,

she worked tirelessly behind the scenes in coordinating campaigns,

and she always had a careful media strategy.

So, I think she might like other aspects of social media.

She'd enjoy the opportunity to communicate on a grand scale,

and so many people being able to take part in the debate.

And she used that fame ruthlessly, along with her incredible intellect,

If she were alive now, she'd challenge us to do the same.

To look at how we can use the vast amount of data now available